A preface of sorts for "Nurturing the Best Love of Children in a Globalizing World"

A few weeks back, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen sent me an as-yet unpublished chapter draft she's contributing to an upcoming book. For those few who have waded through all my recent posts (or even just MSVL's articles that I've posted) you will recognize a few threads of the ongoing obsession I have over women's "place" in society and the Church. But of course I discovered that Ms. Van Leeuwen's scholarship is better than mine (duh, Trott?!).

Beyond that, however, is the growing excitement I have over not just MSVL's contributions to this discussion but also other sources of wisdom I've recently been tapping into. For instance, I'm using a book by John Peck and Charles Strohmer called "Uncommon Sense." It is, to put it in slightly archaic parlance, a "worldview" book. And in some spots, one might even say it is a bit "anti" worldview, in that their ideas are geared toward interacting with the world rather than warring against world, the latter being a more traditional pathway for evangelical apologists.

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is a wonderful example of how to interact with good science (in her case, Social Science) and find in that scholarly pursuit a tremendously encouraging resource for the Gospel. In particular, she parallels Peck and Strohmer's emphasis on "sphere sovereignty," a concept I for one am still treating gingerly but am also finding helpful as (to my shock!) a tool of female and male liberation rather than traditionalist patriarchal bondage.

That is part of the reason I continue to post very long articles on BlueChristian, despite the fact that blogs aren't always the best venue for such lengthy works. I encourage anyone interested in women, children, men, and (esp.) the Gospel's influence over that human community of communities, to delve into at least the below article by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen.

Blessings,
Jon Trott

tag: children, Christianity, Christians for Biblical Equality, family, Love, Love in the western world, marriage, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, sociological, sociology, women