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It was the first night of our seminary course in Christian social ethics, and the classroom was packed. At our school we have three required courses in theology, but just one in ethics. I don’t want to read too much into this uneven weighting of our core curriculum, but most would agree that it is classically evangelical. I began that evening with a question that seemed to throw a few of the students: “Why should we be good?” There was general agreement that we ought to be, but a good deal of confusion about why we need to be. For centuries, Protestants, and evangelical Protestants in particular, have struggled to answer this clearly and well, and the seminarians that night were no exception. Our great fear, I guess, is that we might compromise the Gospel of grace by making it conditional on moral performance. If the moral imperative is less than imperative, we should not be surprised that we face a shortage of saints.

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Hey, what’s up with this Sarah Palin? If she’s elected VP, won’t she sort of “have authority” over men? Like maybe 150 million of them! Do you think a hockey mom (self-described as a pit bull with lipstick) is practicing appropriate biblical submission? Will her husband Todd still get to be the decider on the domestic front? Will it be sufficient if, while Sarah is sending American troops into Russia or deciding to annex Canada, that Todd can decide whether the family buys or leases a Ford Expedition for moose hunting and diaper-runs to Wal-Mart? Will he still be “the head”?

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We were strolling through the National Gallery in London, overdosing on great art, when there it was. Sharing space with some of the finest visual wonders ever created, it still stuck out in its deep yellow boldness: “Sunflowers,” by Vincent Van Gogh, the great Dutch painter. I’d seen anemic reproductions of it before, but this was different—a head-on blast to the senses.

Later I recalled Van Gogh’s self-confessed mission in life: “I want to grasp life at its depth,” he once said. Many of us can resonate with that passion. I worry that I lack Van Gogh’s intensity, but I too want to grasp life at its depth. More specifically, I want to grasp and experience Christian spirituality at its depth. Trendy new ideas, or some partisan viewpoints, are not satisfactory. We want to tap into the strong subterranean currents that have sustained Christians across the full spectrum of churches and through the centuries.

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Woody Allen, the famous Jewish comedian and film-maker, was featured in a recent issue of Newsweek (August 18/25, 2008). Allen has always been fall-down funny, but this article reveals a hidden and more intimate side of this celebrity. We discover that he is haunted by the terror of the void, and the apparently meaninglessness and futility of life. You might not pick it up from a lot of our church programming, but this is where Christianity really has something significant to celebrate.

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