IVP - Strangely Dim

On the Great Cloud

You have these moments, every once in a while, when you discover that what you thought was just another ordinary moment is actually something closer to momentous. I had such a moment this morning, when I interviewed an author for an IVP office meeting and, mid-question, realized that this particular author, over the past half-century, has helped to define much of what American evangelicalism has become.

Marie Little is a petite, unassuming ninety-year-old woman with poor eyesight and even poorer hearing. She lost her husband, Paul, in a car accident thirty-three years ago. Since then she's regularly revised and updated his writing to keep it fresh and relevant in a changing publishing climate. Last month IVP Books rereleased two of Paul's books--Know Why You Believe and How to Give Away Your Faith--alongside two books we recently acquired from another publisher: Know Who and Know What You Believe. Marie came to the office for an interview and a reception.

Paul's writing was an extension of his work for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, addressing the core issues he encountered as he spoke to and, more important, listened to college students. There's great footage of Paul interacting directly with students in the video on our website. These college students had sharp intellects and a sixties-era suspicion of all things inherited, particularly the church. Paul honored their skepticism and their intellect, and very effectively turned them again and again toward Jesus, the author and perfecter of their faith. He would go on to write books such as the million-selling How to Give Away Your Faith and Know Why You Believe, one of Christianity Today's fifty books that have influenced evangelicals the most. He would also help to shape the Western church's approach to missions and evangelism through Urbana student mission conferences and the Lausanne Conference, and to teach evangelism to budding pastors and ministers at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Marie was no slouch herself, having spent four years in China in the midst of its Communist upheaval, having started a campus Christian fellowship under the skeptical supervision of a dubious university president, having sought out and nurtured international students as they struggled to make a home in an alien environment. Nor has she been a slouch in the thirty-plus years since Paul's death, both in her writing and revising, and in her ministry to laypeople and leaders at her church and neighbors at her retirement home.

I had four questions to ask Marie during the interview, three of which I dumped in favor of more fascinating topics. The question I kept was this: What is the ongoing task of Christian publishing? She responded with a heartfelt appeal to keep the Word of God central as a point of magnificent connection: the Bible reminds us throughout, and centrally in Christ, that

The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)

Lately I've found myself in a lot of direct interactions with the elderly, and it's only when I'm particularly alert--and even then at best midway through the conversation and more often long after the encounter--that I realize how much history is contained in a single person: how much each set of eyes, however weak, has seen; how much each set of ears, however compromised, has heard. I tend to make much of the up and comers, those authors and thinkers and doers who will define the church out in front of us. But today at least I was reawakened to a healthy respect for those who came before me and whose sweat and anguish contributed to the faith that's been handed down to me.

Highly Unusual

This almost never happens: IVP Books is looking for reader input about the cover design for Just Courage, a forthcoming book by Gary Haugen. You can vote for your favorite here.

Gary Haugen is the president of International Justice Mission, a human rights agency that does battle against the sex trade and exposes slave-labor practices throughout the world, out of a Christian conviction about the God-given dignity of human beings. You can learn more about IJM here.

Cover design is normally a pretty cloistered process. The designer works in relative solitude, reading through the manuscript and coming up with a few possible creative concepts for how the book's central ideas might be conveyed visually. The designer has to reconcile several complex factors in the process of designing a cover, including who the anticipated audience is, where they might reasonably be expected to run across the book, and what images, colors and other visual elements will compel the potential reader to look more closely.

The clock is always ticking, of course, and eventually the designer must show her work to a select group of industry professionals--experts in marketing and selling books, for example, and the editor or editors most familiar with the book, the author and the subject. These folks scratch their heads, stroke their chins, squint and stare from far off and close up as they consider how the proposed covers will appear in ads, online and on the bookshelf. Feel free to pity the poor designer; hardly anyone's work is so broadly and carefully scrutinized.

This work almost always takes place behind the scenes because it's so important to the success of a book, and because the capacity for people's preferences and prejudices about fonts, colors, pictures and shapes to subvert their objectivity is frustratingly high. The only controlled environment, the conventional wisdom goes, for objective decision making about cover design is a conference room in a corporate office somewhere, peopled by professionals who are self-correcting and correcting each other when the occasional slide into personal preference starts to show itself.

Why in the world, then, is IVP Books pulling back the curtain on Gary Haugen's new book? The main reason, perhaps, is that we want everyone to read it. The work of the International Justice Mission cuts across demographics and niche markets precisely because it is an international work that serves the cause of justice, and we each are called to be concerned for justice in the world God has placed us in.

That doesn't mean that we don't want everyone to read all our other books, nor does it mean that we think our other books are less important than this one. What it means is simply that since justice is the responsibility of each of us, we're open in this instance to give each of us a voice.

So stop hanging around here; get over to Behind the Books and vote!

On Books

Friend and coworker Ellen Hsu tagged me in her family blog last week, so, inspired by her, I'm offering you a look inside some of my reading preferences. As you can see, for some of the questions I had a hard time limiting myself to just one book.

1. One book that changed your life: Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen (published by InterVarsity Press!). I read this after I returned from Cambodia in 2005. It reveals so clearly how deeply God's heart beats for justice, and it did a lot to further my thinking about the roles I can play in fighting injustice. Also Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? by Philip Yancey. I read this at a point when I was wrestling with why we pray. And, while Yancey doesn't offer easy answers or really many answers at all, his words and reflections and questions and honesty deepened both my desire to pray and my faith that prayer is essential and does, in fact, make a difference--more than we often know.

2. One book that you have read more than once: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Is it any wonder why? It's amazing.

3. One book you would want on a desert island: The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, which I haven't actually read yet because I haven't had the quiet and space and uninterrupted time a desert island would afford to process what's in it. And I'd take Fred Van Dyke's teaching notes from the class he taught on the book a few years ago at my church.

4. Two books that made you laugh: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Nobody has characters quite like Dickens. Also, the Mitford books by Jan Karon. I'm currently reading the second book, prompted by others I know who read the books and loved them, and by Lauren Winner's confession that the Mitford books played a role in her conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Maybe you have to have grown up in a small town as a pastor's kid like I did to really appreciate the Mitford books in your twenties, but whatever the reason--I just really like them. The quirky characters (some of whom will remind you of people you know!) and the trueness of small-town life and ministry that Karon has captured make me laugh.

5. One book that made you cry: Well, I don't know if I actually cried, but if I didn't I must have been close: When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him. I read this before my first trip to Cambodia in 2005. It's hard to believe what some people have endured in their lifetime.

6. One book you wish you'd written: Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner. I love her writing style, the way the book is organized, her thought processes and the way she weaves together the different experiences of her life. And one more: The Words Under the Words, a collection of poetry by Naomi Shihab Nye. I'd love to write poetry like what's in this book.

7. Two books you are currently reading: A Light in the Window by Jan Karon (see #4) and Likewise's very own Life After Church by Brian Sanders, in preparation for our Likewise Donkey Congress on February 14. Stay tuned.

8. One book you've been meaning to read: Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. And about fifty others. But that's one that's at the top of the list right now.

Now it's your turn! Lindsay? Keith? Doug and Julie? Post your own answers on your blog, or leave us a comment about books you've read.