Vision
Brain Studies
Philip Ball is skeptical as to the value of current efforts in the U.S. and Europe to try to figure out how the brain works. Writing in the December 22, 2014 edition of Prospect, Mr. Ball summarizes three big brain studies which, following the model of the human genome project, are committed to mapping the brain and its neurons, and all their diverse activities and relationships (“Are We Living in the Age of the Brain?” http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/philip-ball/are-we-living-in-the-age-of-the-brain). Mr. Ball doubts that merely gathering data about brain activity will give us the insight neuroscientists seek concerning such important matters as cognition, emotion, or the mind. Present brain studies are committed to the idea of the brain as a kind of computer and all mental and bodily activities a function of neuron activity. I believe Mr. Ball is correct to doubt the value of such projects for helping us fully to understand the brain and these other matters, but the research should prove valuable nonetheless, and probably for reasons not yet on researchers’ radar screens. We will never gain the insight and understanding we seek, in order to become wiser and more fully human, without a holistic view of the human being, one that takes into consideration both the spiritual component of the self and the wholly-integrated nature of the soul and the soul-and-body. 

Beauty under the Microscope
Ours is a world teeming with beauty. How could it not be? It was created and is upheld at every moment by Him Who is the very definition of beauty. So inevitably beautiful is our world, so shot through at every point with breath-taking wonder, that even those parts of our world most of us will never see are stunningly beautiful. And the scientific community agrees. In her photo essay, “Living Large,” Kate Wong shows us, as her subtitle indicates, how “Microscopes find beauty in the most unexpected places” (Scientific American, January 2015). In twelve photos, taken under microscope, Ms. Wong employs the skills and language of art to the work of science, thus effectively demonstrating the possibilities for a closer cooperation between these two avenues of revelation – even a “marriage of science and art.” The photos she exhibits, taken by various scientists, comment on the role of proportion, color, line, similitude, metaphor, and variety in evoking wonder and conveying beauty. Whether the object under consideration is a cancer cell, a crustacean’s skeleton, an insect’s joint, the tongue of a cricket, or the brain of a rat, beauty is hidden and packed in unseen places throughout the world. As Ms. Wong explains, “microscopy continues to expose the extraordinary in the mundane, deepening our understanding of the world we live in – sometimes to great aesthetic effect.” Or as Solomon might have put it, “It is the glory of God to conceal beauty.” Our duty, following the lead of people such as Kate Wong and the editors of Scientific American, is to discover and celebrate that beauty, to the praise of the glory of the grace of our beautiful Savior and King (Prov. 25.2).

Outcomes
Rescuing Culture
Americans appear to be confused and even troubled about culture. Joshua Rothman reports that “culture” was the most looked-up word at the Merriam-Webster website for all of 2014 (“The Meaning of ‘Culture,’” The New Yorker, December 26, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/meaning-culture). For many people “culture” has become a dark, scary, or even trivial thing. Most don’t seem to understand what culture is or what it’s for: “Confusion about culture was just part of the culture this year. People were desperate to know what ‘culture’ meant.” Mr. Rothman has his own explanation for this situation: “Here’s my theory: more people looked up ‘culture’ this year because it’s become an unsettling word. ‘Culture’ used to be a good thing. Now it’s not...the word ‘culture’ has taken on a negative cast. The most positive aspect of ‘culture’ – the idea of personal, humane enrichment – now seems especially remote. In its place, the idea of culture as unconscious groupthink is ascendant.” Culture has become unmoored, taken captive by subjective, dark forces which make it a shady, uncertain, or trivial pursuit. But the importance of “culture” won't go away: “‘Culture’ may be pulling itself apart from the inside, but it represents, in its way, a wish. The wish is that a group of people might discover, together, a good way of life; that their good way of life might express itself in their habits, institutions, and activities; and that those, in turn, might help individuals flourish in their own ways.” For this to happen, though, a good bit of culture defining, refining, renewing, rejecting, and restoration will need to be done. Is it just me, or is there a huge door of opportunity cracking open here before the Christian community?

Subversive and Transforming
The followers of Christ in the generation of the Apostles were viewed as upending the social order, an ominous charge in the first-century world of the Roman Empire (Acts 17.1-9). But the charge was accurate and the upending intentional, if indirect. Andy Crouch deals with the challenge of Christianity to the centuries-old institution of slavery in a later section of his book, Playing God. He shows how Paul’s letter to Philemon laid a groundwork for Christians to restore dignity to the enslaved without sowing chaos and violence into the social order. Paul was equally indirect but no less clear in subverting and transforming certain received protocols concerning young people and widows in the Roman world in his first epistle to Timothy. As David W. Pao explains in the December 2014 issue of JETS, Paul deftly relocated social protocols regarding these groups from their grounding in mere history and tradition to a proper footing in the redemptive work of Christ (“Let No One Despise Your Youth: Church and World in the Pastoral Epistles”). “Though marginalized” by Roman culture and society, young people like Timothy and the widows of the Church “are to be honored as visible symbols of the powerful gospel. Grounded and empowered in their hope in the living God, they can serve as examples for their community of believers. No longer despised, they represent the one and only Savior God.” His conclusion to this brief study shows why the Christian community needs careful scholars, solid scholarship, and institutions like the Evangelical Theological Society: “Paul’s stance in 1 Timothy should not be considered as simply accommodation or subversion; instead he calls for a transformation that both transcends the accepted ideals that Christians could share with the dominant culture, and challenges practices and social norms that Christians should abandon. Paul grounds both in God’s redemptive plan in history since it is this redemptive plan that fundamentally alters one’s existence. This redemptive work would in turn empower believers to lead a faithful life as witnesses to all.” Well said.

Envoi
Brick Maker

What’s that I’m making? Bricks, and nothing more.
These sentences and words are all I know.
I hope their usefulness might long endure.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my bricks. I pour
my heart and mind into each one, although
they’re only bricks – just bricks, and nothing more.

No soaring edifice or tome’s in store
for me. My calling is to bricks, just so.
(I hope their usefulness might long endure.)

Someone might use my bricks to build a more
impressive structure. Someone else might throw
these bricks I’m making (bricks, and nothing more),

to smash the false front of some worldview store.
I cannot know to what ends they might go;
I hope their usefulness might long endure.

Take these my bricks. Make them your own, and go,
build truth and beauty, or bring hubris low:
I’ll keep on making bricks, and nothing more,
and hope their usefulness might long endure.

T. M. Moore