A brand new book I wrote this past year, Basics for a Biblical Worldview has just been released. It’s a sixth grade biblical worldview textbook for BJU Press. For this project I was privileged to rejoin as a freelancer the team I was on at BJU Press for nine years, the Biblical Worldview Team. I really need to underline that I didn’t write this book like I wrote Authorized; that book was an individual effort while this one was decidedly a team effort. For this new book I wrote according to a theological vision provided by the gifted friends and mentors I worked with and under at BJU Press. I wrote according to an outline and a set of careful lesson objectives that was already prepared by that experienced and excellent team. One insight they had that felt exactly right to me was that identity issues needed to get a lot more attention than they did a number of years back when we planned and produced a twelfth grade book on biblical worldview. In this new book we also spent some time talking through major world religions. This sixth grade book is not a reworking of our prior book; it is a completely fresh approach for middle schoolers. I’ll be having my oldest son go through it next year. That will be an experience! I think families with middle schoolers could use this book for family devotions. I worked very hard to make it engaging and accessible. It was a real delight to serve Christ’s body in this way.
The art is incredibly well conceived and executed; the art and design team at BJU Press is just excellent. It serves the message of the book well, which is that God is bringing glory to himself by restoring this fallen world by the work of Christ.
Here’s the outline of the book:
- What is a worldview? (avoids the trap of a merely intellectualist approach)
- What is the big story of the Bible? (relates creation-fall-redemption to the concept of worldview)
- Who is God? (sources truth, goodness, beauty, and love in God)
- Who am I? (identity issues)
- How should I spend my time? (education and culture)
- How should I relate to others? (gender, family, friendship)
- How should I fit into society? (community, individuality, govt.)
- How do I relate to other worldviews? (Islam, Buddhism, unbelief, secularism, moralistic therapeutic deism)
Nerdy note: I wrote this whole book, 2,000 words a week for just over a year, often on the bus on my daily commute, in markdown in Ulysses, which I have through Setapp; I also wrote a script that converted that markdown to appropriate Word styles for use by BJU Press editorial. Markdown is the way to go for writers! So lightweight and powerful!
Thank you for your work in this important topic! If my kids’ school is not using this curriculum, is the student edition presented in way that a young person (who loves to read) could read straight through it on their own?
Absolutely, yes. Suitable for family devotions, too, possibly.
It’s interesting (and to me, disappointing) that the book uses KJV for scripture quotations. I would love to know what you think about that choice for 6th graders, Mark, and how you reconcile it with what you wrote in your book Authorized.