About this Blog

In a culture full of people who long to be spiritual but have little vocabulary for spiritual things, how can we use the power of language to testify to what we as Christians believe and experience? Avoiding triumphalism, defensiveness, and dogmatism on the one hand and mere yeasty yearnings for transcendence on the other, how can we tell the ancient mysteries of God in fresh and relevant ways? How can we practice and model the habits of “scrupulous inquiry” that a life of faith promises to teach us?

During the summer of 2006, 17 people from a variety of disciplines including publishing, academia, and the pastorate met on the campus of Calvin College to explore these questions. Our time together was part of Calvin’s Seminars in Christian Scholarship program and our seminar was funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., under the auspices of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.

This blog is a follow-up forum to our seminar in which we hope to continue to inspire and challenge one another. Our goal is to find ways in which each of us, according to our particular gifts and place in life, can practice excellence in the literary arts and “put all things in God’s account,” witnessing in the broadest sense to contemporary audiences—the curious, the lurking, the committed, the confused, the self-satisfied, the hurting.