Fire and Knowledge

I seem to have developed a habit where I desire to write things that have already been written. This undoubtedly branches from my bibliographic ignorance. I could list several examples of this, but I will use only one. I have written a fairly extensive outline talking about various cultural trends and suggestions on how to avoid relapsing into a kind of “technological dark age.” While I still think such a work has eventual merit, I have found a book that accomplishes a similar goal in regards to the evangelical Christian community. It is entitled Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do About It.

Written 11 years ago by Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds is a work every Christian should read at least once. I am serious. It is a helpful (not to mention very concise) overview of a variety of cultural (secular and religious) trends that have impacted evangelicalism for the better and for the worse. From postmodernism to advertising to television to premillenialism to pietism, he doesn’t hold back the punches.

Have you ever wondered why modern Christians imitate and adapt culture instead of creating it? Why evangelical leaders are not “equipped intellectually to think through the complex social issues of the times and offer genuinely new and promising solutions to them” (p. 13) ? Why evangelicalism has a tendency to slide into anti-intellectualism (“a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind”)? Or falsely dichotomizing the “heart” against the “head”? This book will answer your questions.

The one drawback is that most of the book talks about the many negatives of culture but does not talk enough about ways to combat the negative influences. Because of this, I have listed several more works below that would be of interest to people who want to begin cultivating a Christian mind. Of course while the first action is to begin thinking, it does not always start until people begin reading. It’s impossible to think without knowing anything. With that in mind, my first recommendation is The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer since it gives an extremely helpful overview of good classic books to read (with summaries), including how to read them.

Fit Bodies, Fat Minds is only 152 pages. Even the slowest reader could finish it in a week if they devoted half an hour a night to it. So I plead with you, read this book and seek to develop a Christian mind for the glory of God!

Related Books

• The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer
• Habits of the Mind by James Sire
• All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture by Kenneth A. Myers
• The Christian Mind by Harry Blamires
• The Vanishing Word by Arthur Hunt
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
• How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren