A few weeks ago, I tinkered around with this blog's layout a bit more and added an official blogroll. I'm not sure quite how that's different than a list of links, but all the cool kids are doing it, and I'd best get on board the blogroll train. The contents of the blogroll, like any "favorite links" list, are an imperfect but still-revealing peek at th sort of stuff I consume on a semi-daily basis. A lot of news, a lot of weird and strange gadget and biotech related stuff, a lot of politics and current events, and so on. There's also a heavy dose of sites that specialize in X-Factor, the random stuff that you wouldn't know to look for but are delighted when you find it. Massive archives of corporate logos in high-res EPS, plans for building a railgun, essays on the life of Jane Austen, high-res photos of London subways... that kind of stuff.

There's another category, though, that lives in its own little subsection. Faith. I'm a Christian. So to me, the word "faith" is more than a simple concept of trusting-in-something or a generic "spirituality." It's about an ongoing attempt to discover and related to the Creator of the universe, a mysterious thing in and of itself. I do this inside the framework of relatively orthodox Christianity. While I question and challenge and discard and re-examine an awful lot (often enough to make my Christian family nervous), the core of my "worldview" is on the relative straight-and-narrow in Christian terms.

Over at the New Pantagruel, writers Jack Heller and David Naugle are grappling with a question that's close to home for me. What, they ask, is a Christian worldview? The phrase is thrown around a lot, but the definitions of it are often so vague as to be unhelpful, or so precise as to be mere dogma for a particular branch of the relatively spread-out tree of the Christian faith. While it's good that those branches can precisely define their beliefs, it's not very helpful when trying to articulate the broader underpinnings of a general Christian way-of-seeing-the-world.

Naugle, discussing Heller's earlier article, notes:

He is rightly concerned about the possible imposition of a rather rigid, "one-size-fits-all" interpretation of the Christian faith upon a diversity of authors in the Western canon that would cloud their idiosyncrasies and other important aspects of their lives, transform them into contemporary evangelicals, and reduce intelligent criticism to an enforced "'Mere Christianity' worldviewism." Undoubtedly, some educators "armed" with a Christian worldview employ this strategy. But for Heller, it is woefully monochromatic and too definitive for his taste. Mine too.

Once again, however, a question must be raised: Is this a liability of the Christian worldview concept per se? Does a Christian worldview in and of itself demand this kind of teaching? Or is this not the fault of a faulty worldview pedagogy that is rather unsophisticated in technique, and/or employed with too much apologetic zeal?

I think anyone raised in the Evangelical tradition (or in its general vicinity) knows that his latter suspicion is pretty close to the truth. If we accept the idea of a broad Christian Worldview, though, a particular way of seeing reality and the world around us that is held by those who follow the Christian tradition... well, the work of defining it is still left.

I think one of the very core concepts is the idea that God is singular in nature -- in other words, God is an entity of some sort with no peer or equal. Following that, there's the idea that God is in some fashion directly responsible for reality as we perceive and experience it. Subtler ideas ripple from there. Because God in some way "fashioned" material reality and humanity in general, there are certain ways in which humanity is meant to operate. Call it "good" or call it "healthiness" or "holiness" or anything to want at this point. The flip side is that it is possible for things and for humans to operate in ways that contradict that "original intent." Decisions to live and operate in these contradictory ways is destructive, in invisible and sometimes visible ways. As Christians, we call it sin and believe that every human being has, to some extent, chosen to live in these damaging and destructive ways.

There are certainly other core ideas that I'm sure have to be in there to form a distinctively Christian worldview, rather than a generic "monotheistic" or "Judeo-Christian" or "North American Religious" worldview. Still, even those core memes outlined above provide a pretty distinctive perspective when contemplating big-picture concepts like philosophy, morality, ethics, art, etc. I'm still pondering; I'm sure more posts will follow.