GROWING TOGETHER

One of the best ways we can grasp the idea of an "incarnational lifestyle" is to look at people in the past who have blazed the trail ahead of us and have shared their journey with us. I list for your growth and reading selected individuals, along with some of their writings, that are shining examples. Some of these books are not presently in print—but, of course, that is why we have libraries.

John Woolman is, for me, perhaps the most stellar example of how this way of living actually works. Others have felt the same. Charles Lamb intones, "The only American book I ever read twice was the Journal of Woolman. . . . Get the writings of John Woolman by heart." Emerson agreed—I find more wisdom in these pages than in any other book written since the days of the apostles." Why would an eighteenth-century Quaker tailor, businessman, and minister of Christ engender such comments? Find out for yourself by reading The Journal and Major

Essays of John Woolman. I recommend the Phillips P. Moulton edition.

Those who wove their Christianity throughout a literary life are many and varied. For novelists we can do no better than turn to the Russians, in particular, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and in our day Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are philosophical detective stories in which both the murderer and the meaning of life are simultaneously pursued. His novel The Idiot gives us an engaging Christ-figure in Prince Mishkin (you see, the Forrest Gump character is nothing new) and asks the penetrating question of all who blithely conform to contemporary societal norms, "Who is the real idiot?" Tolstoy is known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina in which he engages us in the great struggles of human souls from war to peace and love—love between men and women, love of country, and supremely Christian love. But I must admit I am not as intrigued with Tolstoy as a writer as I am with him as a tortured, struggling