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If there is one thing that has defined evangelical Christians, it is their volatile relationship to the cultures where they have sojourned. In America, evangelicals have at various times enjoyed everything from near hegemony to internal exile. They have abjured political power and sold pearls of great price to obtain it—often in the same lifetime. They have censored, critiqued, consumed, and copied the fruits of mass culture—sometimes all at once. They have harbored some of the most enduringly radical American voices on social responsibility and racial justice, yet in recent years their most innovative and influential leaders have been found in exurban locales of homogeneous wealth. They have produced notable scholars of history and enthusiastic popularizers of the end of the world.
It would be more honest, though, to say "we" instead of "they." As a publication of Christianity Today International, Books & Culture is very much part of the ongoing, unpredictable, sometimes combustible evangelical engagement with culture. Over the next three years we will join our sister magazines Christianity Today and Leadership Journal in the Christian Vision Project, an effort to ask three "big questions" that define critical territory in the Christian relationship to culture, mission, and the gospel. In the first year, with the generous assistance of the Pew Charitable Trusts, we focus on the question, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good? This piquant phrase, which we have borrowed from the Rev. Timothy Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, juxtaposes two neglected themes. We hope the contributions in these pages, on the website ChristianVisionProject.com that will launch in February, and in a series of DVD documentaries will spark much fruitful conversation and action.
We have asked six people to respond to this question in Books & Culture in 2006. All of them are serious and creative Christian thinkers—though not all are evangelical Protestants—and many will be familiar to longtime readers. Perhaps none will be more familiar than our first contributor, Lauren F. Winner, who at 29 is completing a Ph.D. in American religious history from Columbia University while both teaching and studying at Duke Divinity School, and travels widely speaking to audiences in the wake of her book Real Sex. With all this on her plate, perhaps the subject of her answer to our "big question" is natural—but that doesn't make it any less important.
My subject is the theology of sleep. It is an unusual subject, but I make no apology for it. I think we hear too few sermons about sleep. After all, we spend a very large share of our lives sleeping. I suppose that on an average I've slept for eight hours out of twenty-four during the whole of my life, and that means that I've slept for well over twenty years. What an old Rip van Winkle I am! But then, what Rip van Winkles you all are, or will one day become! Don't you agree then that the Christian gospel should have something to say about the sleeping third of our lives as well as about the waking two-thirds of it?
—John Baillie, "The Theology of Sleep," in Christian Devotion (1962)
Last night, I pulled one of my very few all-nighters. These were not uncommon in my college years, but my capacity to stay up all night and be anything approximating coherent the next morning has declined as I've marched through my twenties. So now I stay up all night very rarely, once every two years or so, and only when I am truly desperate.
But the storied all-nighters are just the most extreme example of something many of us do quite a lot: chip away at sleep in order to do something else. Usually that something else is work.
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