EDUCATION

The Alethia Foundation finds ways to bridge some of the gaps that people experience between faith and reason, church and community, scholarship and practical Christian living.   Some projects are dedicated to bringing the fruits of research to more general audiences, through forums of discussion, in practical  applications of theoretical ideas, and in resources for Christian formation.   Others projects provide teaching and learning tools for use by students and churches.   

Each of these programs needs funding.  Your support is gratefully received.

The Rule of Alethia   The Rule of Alethia  is inspired by and modeled on the ancient monastic Rules such as the Rule of St. Benedict.  It is a guide for everyday Christian life. This guide, working out of a new knowledge paradigm, supports devotion and piety but does so with respect for the intelligence of the individual and for the role of critical thinking in faith. It reasons out an applied Christian moral vision, addresses social, political and economic issues, family life, devotional and psychological processes of self-discovery, spiritual development, study, work and service.

We find that people in our churches, and elsewhere, are hungry for straightforward, concrete practical help, that lets them organize their personal lives and actions around biblical ideals.

Directives from the right wing are repugnant to many of them; still the unmet need remains for simple guidelines to measure, compose, and focus their time and value-discernment in cluttered, noisy, busy lives.

How -what can they do- in order to "rule" their lives in accordance with their principles, anchored in the sovereignty of Christ?   How, by what spiritual and practical techniques, can we cultivate the inner life, make progress in self-understanding, and bring to fullness the communal life?

The "Rule of Alethia" project differs from many other such guides in its progressive social agenda and, more basically, in the nature of the underlying vision from which it derives its applications: a unified, comprehensive, ecumenically-minded perspective, informed by many disciplines.   It is a teaching tool for parish and parents, a reflection-to-action tool for individuals.

This project serves the larger Alethia mission by tracing out how a new Christian synthesis plays out in "real life."

 Xavier Mellery     "After Evening Prayers"

http://www.artmagick.com/paintings/painting1222.asp

The Underground Christian  is another example of an educational project. Prepared as a manual for college students whose faith is under fire, a portion of it takes Question and Answer format based on challenges, criticisms and questions garnered from the actual experience of undergraduate students. Responses, references, resources, and "hot lines," are indexed into a notebook which also includes a "retreat master," a guide for a prayer journal, with prayers and other aids to Christian spiritual life for use during the crucial college years.

As students come up against predictable, and all too often fatal, questions which seem to discredit Christian faith, this project provides a compendium of learned answers.

But it goes well beyond rebuttal. It encourages progress in faith through thorough-going critical thinking, fed from a well-spring of prayer and worship. This project is intended as an intervention at the point where the church loses so many of its sons and daughters: in their young adult, college years.

The Underground Christian  keeps an alternative vision, an intellectually impelling Christian picture of reality, in the critical dialog, filtering back into debate in the classroom, dorm room, studio, playing field, and student hang-outs.

This tool intercepts students at points where  Christian faith is often abandoned.   But it also  moves forward students who might clung with divided mind to an infantile form of it.   The goal is to escort students through the college years, launching them on a life-time intellectual pilgrim’s progress.

A poignant appeal was posted by a theologian on a academic Christian listserv on the internet recently.  He had received an email had come from a girl who was a high school senior. She was looking for help from Christian scholars and professors.

"Hi there. I was just visiting this site and I found your e-mail address. I am taking a philosophy course, and I am the only Christian in the class. I was hoping that you could provide me with the e-mail addresses of people who can help me answer questions for this course and any web links that might help me. I'm getting severe headaches in this class due to the daily attacks on Christianity. Thank you very much."

Many students abandon their Christian faith simply because it has been ridiculed or bullied out of them.  Through this project, The Alethia Foundation provides a scholarly backbone from which such attacks on Christianity can be answered forcefully and persuasively.   "Defending the faith" is quite the opposite of crusading or of coercion, physical or psychological; it is a matter of  study and research, wisdom, acute reasoning, skill and integrity in debate, spiritual sensibilities, love and compassion.

The Underground Christian intends to equip young people via the experience of their college years, giving them the techniques for dealing honestly with the trials and questions that will challenge their faith, but which can also help it to mature through trust in the love of Christ and reliance on the presence of the Holy Spirit.

With this program, The Alethia Foundation helps bridge the gap from church to campus, and the perceived gap between faith and intellect.

What We Have Received is a series for video and web site media. Selected scholars, activists, scientists, public figures and others speak candidly about the reasons for their Christian faith, and about its relation to their work and life.  Conceived in the evangelical tradition of "giving testimony", the video series is a medium  of "so great a cloud of witnesses" as gives contradiction to stereotypes about the Christian mentality and values, and invite a reconsideration of Christian faith and modernity.

Taken as a whole, this multitude of voices in their varieties of expertise and perspective, bears witness to the wider phenomenon: an emergent Christian paradigm. Unifying themes are brought to the surface from this network of individual offerings, and, like tributaries feeding a broader river, make visible a viable Christian synthesis in a post-modern world.

Chalice is a weekly radio broadcast of The Alethia Foundation, featuring interviews, music, poetry, and discussion.    

Henry Vaughan    "The World"      1650 

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light
All calm as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world
And all her train were hurled.
The doting Lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit's sour delights;
With gloves and knots, the silly snares of pleasure;
Yet his dear treasure
All scattered lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flower.

The darksome Statesman hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight fog, moved there so slow
He did nor stay nor go;
Condemning thoughts, like sad eclipses, scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digged the mole, and, lest his ways be found,
Worked under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; but One did see
That policy.
Churches and altars fed him, perjuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rained about him blood and tears, but he
Drank them as free.

The fearful Miser on a heap of rust
Sat pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust;
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves.
Thousands there were as frantic as himself,
And hugged each one his pelf.
The downright Epicure placed heaven in sense
And scorned pretence;
While others, slipped into a wide excess,
Said little less;
The weaker sort, slight, trivial wares enslave,
Who think them brave;
And poor despisèd Truth sat counting by
Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing and weep, soared up into the Ring;
But most would use no wing.
'Oh, fools,' said I, 'thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shows the way,
The way which from this dead and dark abode
Leaps up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.'
But as I did their madness so discuss,
One whispered thus,
This Ring the Bridegroom did for none provide
But for his Bride.