David Miller’s God at Work thoughtfully examines the Christian presence in business over the past century. He notes that pastors pray for teenagers as they leave for short-term mission trips and Sunday school teachers as they begin a new semester, but not for certified public accountants around April 15, or salespeople and those working on commission at the end of the month or year, when quotas are due.

The basic problem is that many see church or missionary work as “fulltime Christian service” but business offices largely as places to earn money that can support the real Christian workers (with maybe some workplace evangelism on the side). Seldom is heard the encouraging word that business activities can be worthy ends in themselves – for isn’t God, who created us in His image, glorified when we show creativity through the products we make and the services we render?

Miller also points to an anti-capitalist ethos at many seminaries and among many pastors: “Many of today’s leading senior theologians, ethicists, and clergy are deeply influenced by Christian Socialism, branches of Barthianism…, liberation theology (emphasizing state-controlled economic structures, rejecting free markets, and viewing capitalist businesses as oppressors), and even some Franciscan and monastic strands that glorify poverty and simplicity.” He writes of ministers who court financial pledges from businessmen and then, from the pulpit, bite the hand that feeds them.

The deeper week-by-week problem is not ingratitude or hypocrisy but irrelevance, Miller points out: “Frustrated by the apparent lack of interest or uneducated response to the challenges they face in the marketplace, many workers and professionals simply give up on the church and turn instead to secular therapists, consultants, and self-help guides for ethical guidance and spiritual nurturing.”

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Thomas C. Oden, a leading expert on Christian writings from 100 to 500 A.D., is the author of many theological works and the general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. His new book, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind, may upset what he calls “the common misconception that the flow of intellectual leadership in early Christianity moved from Europe to Africa, not vice versa.”

Oden told WOW that a “liberal bias wrongly assumed that Africa was inexperienced in understanding cultural conflict resolution and only needed larger doses of European enlightenment to solve its maladjustments. Many thus missed entirely the literary richness of the distinctive African Christian imprint on proto-Europe and the formation of the Christian mind. These misjudgments were passed on through graduate study programs.”

Oden contends that in Christian history “the flow of intellectual leadership demonstrably moved largely from Africa to Europe – south to north,” with Christian thought “cradled and nurtured” in Africa…. Africans were informing and instructing and educating the very best of Syriac, Cappadocian, and Greco-Roman teachers…. Inattention to this south-to-north movement has been unhelpful (even hurtful) to the African sense of intellectual self-worth. It has seemed to leave Africa without a sense of distinguished literary and intellectual history.”

Augustine, for example, was African, and his family wasn’t just hugging the Mediterranean coast: He “was born and raised far from the sea in a remote inland Numidian town (Thagaste) with mixed racial stock…. Among Augustine’s known family and friends were people who had Berber, Punic, Numidian, Roman, and even Libyan names.”

Tertullian, Cyprian, and Athanasius also were African, but African intellectuals ostensibly trying to overthrow European influence pay more attention to Europeans. Oden says that’s because “Many African academics are trained in European or American universities dominated by the failed assumptions of modernity.” He notes that a review of references in books by African intellectuals will typically show many more citations of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Marcuse than Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, and Augustine.

Oden hopes that young scholars and pace-setting universities will take on the task of righting the historical record.

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In The Blue Star, Tony Earley picks up the story of Jim Glass—which he began eight years ago in Jim the Boy—as a senior in high school in Aliceville, North Carolina in the early 1940’s.

Jim is contending with an increasingly complex world. School is mostly fun and being a senior certainly has its privileges. But more sober realities — relationships, love, decisions, race, class, war, the past, the dead (who even speak from the grave), and the uncertain future—reveal themselves and demand Jim’s response.

How does the boy respond? Will he begin to assume responsibility? Earley suggests that having a community helps. Jim’s mother and the three uncles with whom he lives give him a model for how adulthood looks and the stability and love that allow him to press forward, however awkwardly, into what he must become. Jim must learn how to live.

Wendell Berry, who has much to say about another boy, Huckleberry Finn, grappling with growing up, elsewhere writes, “A young person, coming of age in a healthy household and community, will understand his or her life in terms of membership and service.”

If you haven’t read Jim the Boy, start there and read straight through The Blue Star. It’s an easy and enjoyable read since the books maintain an almost juvenile form. Their stylistic simplicity can at first be deceiving, but before long you realize that Tony Earley is describing experiences that are all too familiar. It’s this recognition that leads to the conclusion that The Blue Star is more than good young adult fiction, it’s good fiction.

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The April 5 issue of WORLD includes an interview with Udo Middelmann, president of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation and the author of many books including one new one, The Innocence of God (Paternoster, 2007). Here are some more of Middelmann’s thoughts from that interview.

WORLD: Is all the world a stage?

UM: I describe reality as that stage or set of stages, the seen and the unseen, where there are multiple actors. There’s God acting continuously to limit, to oppose, to repair the damage that sin has produced. There are human beings who either go along with it or delay the completion, as the older generation did when they came out of Egypt and wouldn’t believe what God had promised them. Plus, there isn’t only God acting and human beings acting, there’s the whole angelic and demonic entity…

WORLD: So the openness theologian says that God doesn’t know what’s going to happen one minute from now, and you’re saying that God does know, but you criticize the view that for God all time is the present.

UM: Yes. My proposition is based on the realization that much of the Christian church has adopted a Greek view or Hellenistic view of time, of perfection, of knowledge, instead of the Jewish, biblical view… that while God knows the end from the beginning, not everything that God knows has happened, nor would it necessarily happen.

For instance, I refer to that little incident in 1 Samuel 23 when David is talking, hiding from Saul who pursues him in a city called Keilah, he asks God “when Saul comes to the city gates will the people hand me over?” and God says “Yes, they will hand you over.” Like any man in his right mind David runs away and Saul hears about it and never gets to the city. So, the God of the Bible knows all kinds of things, including the things that will only be if certain conditions are met, or may never be.

Before creation God — the Holy Trinity – discusses, ‘What kind of world should we make?’ What kind of bushes, apple trees, people, animals? He had, I’m sure, a lot of things in mind that he decided not to make. If we can think of unicorns, he could have. He decided not to concoct them. So, not everything that God knows in his mind by necessity becomes real.

WORLD: How can true prophets prophecy accurately if the future is indeterminate?

UM: They can because our God knows the end from the beginning. But there are all kinds of things that God does not prophecy about and in these areas there is genuine creativity both for good and for evil, and thus the course of history can be affected by that.

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The New Deal began 75 years ago this month, but its mythology is still fresh. Many Americans still believe that when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, the United States began to come out of Depression. Not so, declares Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins, 2007), a splendidly-written history of governmental economic intervention during the 1930s.

Shlaes, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council of Foreign Relations, told WOW that the thesis of her book “is not especially controversial for economists, but it is controversial for historians who have not kept up with the economic findings. The argument is that the government made the depression worse.” Shlaes makes that argument based on abundant research and thoughtful analysis.

Roosevelt’s most famous line was “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself,” yet Shlaes writes about government officials intimidating business during the 1930’s and experimenting so much that they “scared the markets. Today, we watch business television and know unknowns are bad for the stock market. Roosevelt was king of the unknowns. One day he would be for big business, the next day he hates big business.” Roosevelt, she says, was “mercurial,” and that’s no way to run a White House. The result was a petrified market, year after year through the 1930s, with Washington misspending funds that could have been used by business to create more jobs.

The standard apologetic for FDR, of course, is that he saved America from revolution, but Shlaes as she did her research “had no sense that Americans wanted revolution. The Democratic platform in 1932 was as placid and moderate as could be. Americans didn’t really want revolution; they just wanted to have growth back.”

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After Edmund is a group of Georgia-based music-school buddies who decided to take their name from the primary source of “literary” Christian band names—C.S. Lewis. Their fantastical press release describes a band that ponders things like “facilitating better art,” and proceeds to unironically compare them to Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Wilco, Keane, the Foo Fighters, and Muse.

Providing its usual voice of reason and sharp critical judgment, the Christian music press described Hello as “groundbreaking” and “wave-making.” Of course, this grandiose exaggeration sets any realistic critic up for an avalanche of balloon-bursting one-liners, so it’s only fair to give this record an exceptionally long time to sink in.

Hello provides the perfect platform for a discussion of “talent” versus “creativity.” The press materials are hardly lying when they say the members of After Edmund are talented—slickly produced as this album may be, there’s no denying that these guys can play their instruments. But there is a Grand Canyon between technical skill and musical genius. Many can be trained to play an instrument well, few can apply their technical proficiency toward original compositions that are truly groundbreaking.

Hello is only groundbreaking in the sense that the Christian music demographic may not have heard this particular sound—sturdy mainstream rock with British affections—before. But everyone else has. We’ve heard Muse use that rotating synth arpeggio that opens “Thank God” and My Chemical Romance do that roaring, chromatic chord progression and ripping, Queen-esque guitar solo in “Clouds.” Even the more interesting bits of these songs feel like a less-inspired imitation of something that’s already come and gone, and none of them add up to anything the least bit exciting. It doesn’t even really work as top-speed highway rock. (Yes, I tried it).

There are two truly good minutes of music on this album, and they come in the form of the piano interlude “Go Oboe!”—a classical sonata imitation that showcases one of After Edmund’s individual talents. The rest is—in the words of Walter Kirn —“skillful, but somehow not convincing.”

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Anne Rice’s just-published Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana is #2 on Barnes and Noble’s best-seller list. Rice has been up there before, due to the success of Interview with the Vampire and other bestsellers of a decidedly non-Christian cast. Two decades ago, if anyone might have imagined that she’d now be writing novels about Jesus, the betting line would have been that she’d make Satan the hero. In 1998, though, Rice “began to be more and more concerned with my relationship with God.” She began attending church. She began reading theologians, including those who thought that “Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud.” She “expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong.” She came out concluding that the skeptics were perpetrators and victims of poor scholarship and reasoning.

How did that spiritual and theological change affect her writing? For a time she thought she’d never write about vampires again; now she says she may come back to vampire Lestat one final novel, but it will be from a different direction. Her main work, though, lies in writing about Jesus, whom she calls “the ultimate supernatural hero.”

She’s taken on a hard challenge and made it even greater because she is writing her series about Christ in the first person, a seemingly impossible task: How does a writer enter the mind of God? At least the first book of her new series, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, dealt largely with Jesus’s childhood in Egypt, about which almost nothing is known. This second one, though, and especially its second half, covers baptisms, temptations, and miracles described tersely in the gospels.

Some will hate what she does, but I think she largely pulls it off. An early scene of stoning those thought to be gay suffers from political correctness, but her depictions of Satan tempting Jesus and of the wedding at Cana are superb. She understands that the gospels are tight writing so there’s room to fill in details, with the test of faithfulness being: Does the author make more vivid the biblical account or substitute for it a nonbiblical fantasy? Overall, Rice aces the test.

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After a half-century, books by Thomas Merton remain widely read; The Seven Storey Mountain is a spiritual masterpiece. The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, published in 1959, has still-valid insights; for example, Merton writes that the Pharisees and Judas “had a system all worked out, and a lot of special prayers for every penny given away. It was a very efficient system, almost like a modern ‘charity’ with a huge filing-system and a big sucker list of names… The Pharisees knew how to take care of the poor in such a way that the poor would be always with them.”

Merton notes that Jesus said, “for such gifts, the poor would be always with them. There is a distinction between Charity, the theological virtue, and Charity a modern word meaning a mechanical and impersonal kind of alms giving, as, for example, when a millionaire leaves all his money to ‘Charity.’ The poor will always be there for this kind of alms giving, where the rich man, infinitely distant from the poverty of the poor, scratches with a pen on a paper and starts a long series of bookkeeping entries and abstract transactions which end up a long time later with a nervous social worker scolding a group of kids who are trying to play baseball in a crowded street somewhere in a slum.

Merton concludes wisely that “Without love, alms giving is no more important an activity than brushing your hair or washing your hands.” How much love does our current system of big welfare and big charity show? The good news, though, is that some churches and Christian groups do show love. (We try to tell some of those stories in World.)

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As fanatically loyal as his young fan kingdom may be, Jack Johnson falls squarely into that category of laid-back, happy-sounding adult pop that thrives on the shameless reworking of Oprah/Dr. Phil/Your Next Door Neighbor platitudes and equally populist, everyday emotions.

This music continues to have irresistible appeal, based on its a) generally quite talented musicians; b) beginner-level listening complexity; and c) undeniable effectiveness as the soundtrack to monotonous daily life. The songs end up invading our consciousness so thoroughly that we’d like even the best of them to disappear and never see daylight again. Try flipping on the car radio, shopping in Borders, or eating in a restaurant without hearing Corinne Bailey Rae’s cute-but-beaten-to-death “Put Your Records On.” There’s nothing like corporate radio channels to ruin a good easy-listener.

Through no fault of his own, overplay has brought out the more obnoxious characteristics of Jack Johnson’s several hits (anyone still love “Upside Down,” “Banana Pancakes,” or “Middle Man”?) So it makes a bit of sense that he would “shake it up” on Sleep Through the Static—his phrase for, I guess, the addition of piano and random horns. I will resist the temptation to compare this artistic “turn” to Iron & Wine’s acoustic-poet-turned-folk-band on The Shepherd’s Dog; Johnson hasn’t come anywhere near reinventing himself, and his embellishments, ironically, take him a step closer to his timeless-but-tiresome adult-pop contemporaries.

That’s not to say I’m panning this record, but having to grasp for something to say (either in praise or criticism) is not a great sign. There is a lot to like about the spirited, lilting “Monsoon,” which mimics the melody of Tim McGraw’s “Watch the Wind Go By,” thows in a nice helping of bluesy piano, and returns to Johnson’s signature evocation (“If the moon can turn the tides it can pull the tears/And take them from our eyes/Make them into monsoons”). Johnson’s personality meets Wilco’s guitar proficiency on “They Do, They Don’t,” which features reverberating riffs, some cool jazz percussion, and a momentary descent into some (almost) folk rock.

Jack Johnson is virtually impossible to hate—Sleep Through the Static included — but no one will fault you for being entirely indifferent. After all, this is music no one has to buy or otherwise seek out. Whether it’s in Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Ruby Tuesday, or all of the above, it will find you soon enough.

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The freed members of the threesome formerly known to Christendom as dcTalk have introduced us to their individual selves with two-thirds tepid results: straight-laced, boring pop (Tait), and wildly over-praised, aggressively obnoxious rap (TobyMac). Kevin Max, the most eclectic and talented of the three, is the only one who didn’t drop parts of his name for his new moniker, and who has continued to make interesting music since dcTalk went on permanent hiatus in 2000. And just as the Christian music body count continues to escalate and the industry has either fallen apart or completely transformed (take your pick), this industry veteran returns to lob a curveball at the whole idea of what “Christian music” is in the first place.

Allow me to analyze Max by continuing to analyze dcTalk. From another era of evangelicalism and of American culture, dcTalk’s mainstream success and Grammy awards (unlike those of Casting Crowns) actually meant something. When these three first released gold albums and charted on mainstream radio, there wasn’t clonetastic Christian rock. No established cash-cow infrastructure handed them their “success” before they’d ever played a show. However one feels about their hokey Christianism, I would venture to suggest dc Talk succeeded on its talents more than its message. No one had quite heard anything like “Jesus Freak” before. And I maintain that “In the Light” and “Consume Me” are as well-written pop songs as any other alternative rock that blossomed in the 1990s.

Those roots are half of what informs The Blood, which is equal parts dcTalk and black and Southern gospel. In the tiny bit of promotional material squeezed onto the card accompanying my advance copy, Max explains his attempt to connect modern music, as well as his spiritual self, with the gospel music that is so integral to American heritage. He hopes his effort will not be a retread of gospel classics or a “homogenized, white” attempt to replicate the black-gospel soul. And he absolutely pulls it off—the authenticity, more than the musical result, is one of the highlights of The Blood. Not Christian music so much as a study of Christian music, this record nostalgically holds up gospel music in its purer form, so much richer in culture than the plasticized nonsense that more or less purports to carry its torch.

Max’s fluid vocals are so eternally associated with dcTalk that his old band appears to be all over this record. But the flashbacks are as literal as they are figurative. After a scene-setting but throwaway rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross,” Michael Tait and Toby McKeehan join Max for the gusty, rocking “The Cross.” With three-strand harmony and a spiraling guitar solo, it is a skillful, surprisingly classic exegesis of dcTalk’s just-under-the-surface affection for African-American soul. Max cheekily blends his former band’s fist-pumping, evangelical solidarity with legit, earthy gospel in an energetic cover of Blind Boys of Alabama’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” He could stop there, and the connection he was aiming for has been finally and indisputably made.

Thankfully he doesn’t stop; he’s got a whole lot of soul for a blonde white guy, as he reveals on the show-stopping, pitch-perfect “Trouble of the World,” a Negro spiritual reborn as an indie rock ballad with a choir of gospel ghosts. We’ve got wooden-church-house piano, wisps of organ, but it’s all underlaid with a meaty, distorted guitar arpeggios. Max’s virtuoso vocals again carry “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole,” a cut-time, stripped-down bluegrass cover of Blind Willie Johnson.

Although we get some significant moments of filler and some big-name collaborations that don’t entirely take off, The Blood never once feels like a stock gospel album, nor a fading Christian artist pandering to a new demographic. It should be a compliment to say that Max both covers Johnny Cash and sings with Cash’s sister (“One Way, One Blood”) and still avoids accusations of sucking up. Only a musician with some versatile talent and genuine soul could pull off an album like this, and Kevin Max is the proud owner of both.

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