"It's time! It's time! Did he just say it's time?!"
Over five years ago, Michael Clark, Louima Lilite, and I conceived of a textbook project. We had just finished co-teaching a J-Term (three weeks at the start of January, between fall semester and spring semester) class at Oklahoma Baptist University entitled "Christian Worldview," and geared for first-time freshmen. The goals of the 1-credit-hour course were to introduce students to the concept of worldview, the importance of worldview thought, the contours of a Christian worldview, and some elementary worldview comparison and analysis.
We used James Sire's excellent text,
The Universe Next Door (5th edition) as our only textbook for Christian Worldview. Sire does a phenomenal job of laying out worldview questions, and how 8 different worldviews compare with one another on those questions. His text is rightly a classic in the field. But we wanted, in our course, to do more in two areas: (1) consideration of what worldview is and how it affects us; and (2) outlining and analyzing the contours of a robust Christian worldview. There are, of course, other books that accomplish those tasks admirably. For (1), David Naugle's
Worldview: The History of a Concept is outstanding; James Sire's somewhat-shorter
Naming the Elephant (recently released in a 2nd edition) is also very helpful. For (2), Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's
Living at the Crossroads and Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton's
The Transforming Vision also do a competent job. (Both also do a bit of work on the first aspect, too.)
But no matter how we searched, we could not find a one-stop text that accomplished the three purposes that we had articulated for our J-Term Christian Worldview course: (1) Worldview as a concept; (2) Contours of Christian worldview; (3) Comparison and analysis of other worldviews. Given that we had three weeks to work with in J-Term, we naturally wanted to allocate one week to each of our three purposes, and desired to have course materials that reflected those goals and the desired balance.
We came up empty on our book search. And so the three of us thought it might be a good idea to write our own materials. In 2012, we spent the calendar year sketching, outlining, and then writing the book, which we used in January 2013 with our freshman worldview course. The first go-around was a bit rough around the edges, but the material was helpful and solid. At that point, it seemed like the project was worthwhile, not just for our use internally, but for a broader public as well.
So in Spring 2013 we pitched the course text as a book project to InterVarsity Press, in my estimation the top publisher in academic Christian philosophy and apologetics. Andy LePeau, a senior editor with IVP Academic, adopted the project, and we began working with IVP to revise our materials. Over the subsequent three years, various events intervened: Michael left OBU to pursue a second doctoral degree (in law); Louima withdrew from the textbook project (but graciously left his outline, wisdom, and plans with the project) and was replaced by our good friend David Naugle (from Dallas Baptist University); Andy LePeau retired from IVP and was replaced by Dan Reid as editor for the project.
It has been a roller-coaster of a project, seeing this Worldview textbook along the way. But now, finally, after thousands of hours of research, collaboration, writing, revising, editing, footnoting, indexing, and proof-reading, the book is coming out in 18 days (not that I'm counting)!
