The  Outcome  

"that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding"

TURNING  THE  TIDE         

Each specific project has, of course, its own specific objectives related to the Alethia mission. But broadly speaking, a successful "outcome" of our mission is this: that people in the future will know Christianity not as phenomenon of the past, having some cultural and historic interest, but as a living option, potent and transforming, compelling and liberating.

The outcome is that people inside or outside of the Christian church are able to perceive in the Christian faith what has fallen from general view: its capacity

•  to lead to solutions for human problems
•  to order, logically and coherently, what we know
•  to organize fragmented experience and information
•  to satisfy the deepest spiritual hunger, to nurture the soul
•  to sustain the moral life, to drive personal growth and social reform
•  to enlighten the mind
•  to inspire creativity

Our purpose is to shape a distant future, not to provide short term palliatives.

Our mission is to shape a working Christian worldview for a new age, to put forward the Christian faith restated from its own center, renewed from its source.

The Alethia Foundation exists to point to Jesus Christ as the Logos, the Word and rationality of God, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, the healer and savior of humankind.

The Alethia Foundation is among those who seek this end:

That whatever other philosophies or outlooks may in the future compete for conviction,

Jesus dines in a public house. 
John Perceval    "Christ Dining in Young and Jackson's"    1947
 http://www.stanthonyshrine.org/art_exhibits/Hospitality_art.html

WHAT WOULD THAT LOOK LIKE ?

While each individual project has its own measurable outcome, it’s a little harder --but more important– to talk about the larger, ultimate goals. One measure of our success might be an alteration in attitude in intellectual centers.

Many of the issues of The Alethia Foundation are those with which campus ministry and college chaplaincy, for instance, have been heavily occupied for years. But The Alethia Foundation is doing something different from them in that, while campus ministries are engaged on the front lines, so to speak, Alethia seeks to have an effect upon the milieu in which those ministries operate, where they must be so much on the defensive.

Crass prejudices which would be instantly challenged if directed at other religions are not only permitted but encouraged when they are directed at the Christian faith. Such an atmosphere is scarcely in accord with the model of healthy, open-minded inquiry that is the boast of academic freedom. Yet contempt for Christianity prevails in the ethos of many schools.

Many students who leave their Christian faith behind do so not because they have outgrown it or made an informed rejection, but simply because it has been bullied or ridiculed out of them.

If The Alethia Foundation successfully organizes and presents its theological interpretation of certain current intellectual movements, then on those campuses where Alethia has an influence, the ambiance will moderate from one which is characteristically sneering and hostile toward Christianity, into one which is hospitable, interested, curious and respectful.

Another example of what an outcome might "look like" is a renaissance of Christian art.  A character in Wilton Barnhardt’s novel Gospel  laments the "elevator music of Christianity."

‘Where once ruled Bach and Mozart and Beethoven,’ sighed O’Hanrahan, ‘is now this. That’s what saddens me more than anything about American Christianity. The lack of learning in the ministers, the cliched sermons and backward politics, the shoddiness of the churches, the vapid emptiness of the music...With the wealth of this nation in which nine out of ten citizens claim to be religious, we could have a Sistine Chapel in every city, a Brahms Requiem composed each decade. But for our country’s Christians, art and architecture and scholarship and music are the enemy camp.’

Where shallow sentimentality, consumer-marketing, or the drive for political domination has replaced the living presence of the Christ in churches, Christianity cannot be renewed in the arts, and thus the faith loses that vital voice for itself and the world.

Anywhere Christianity loses its contact with the reality of the Divine, it loses the fountain of its art.

Lame theology cannot produce great art.

It’s the theology that needs repair; art will go where the passion is.

If the work of The Alethia Foundation inspires either for its mission or as a result of it, the quality and frequency of fine art expressive of Christian vision for which the fictional O’Hanrahan yearns, then Alethia considers the degree of its quality and its abundance a measure of our success.