Habits of the Mind
A Mind for God
Chuck Colson

A few years ago, a professor at Pasadena City College led a class discussion on the famous story “The Lottery.” In the story, a seemingly normal village carries out a bizarre ritual involving human sacrifice. The professor, Kay Haugaard, had taught the story many times over the years and was anticipating the usual shocked reactions from her students.

Instead, she found that she was teaching a room full of moral relativists who thought that the ritual might be all right “if it’s a part of a person’s culture . . . and if it has worked for them.” To Haugaard’s horror, she realized that “no one in the whole class of twenty ostensibly intelligent individuals would go out on a limb and take a stand [even] against human sacrifice.” The very mentality that Jackson’s story warns us about—“the dangers of being totally accepting followers, too cowardly to rebel against obvious cruelties and injustices”—had become the mentality of this group of intelligent college students.

Haugaard writes, “It was a warm night when I walked out to my car after class that evening, but I felt shivery, chilled to the bone.” James Emery White tells this story in his excellent new book A Mind for God. White, the new president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, wants us to understand just how dangerous it can be to live life without a worldview that teaches that “each person has value, and there is meaning and purpose to every life.” the rest