1. What is reported?

2. Which sides are presented?

3.  Who are the sources?

4. How are they characterized?

5. What is the tone of the report?

6. What is the underlying assumption or presupposition?

7. How is the action described?

8. What statistics are used?

9. What is left out of the news story?

10.  Is there any faulty reasoning in the report?

1. What is Prime reality- the really real?

2. What is the nature of external reality, that is , the world around us?

3. What is a human being?

4. What happens to a person at death?

5. Why is it possible to know anything at all?

6. How do we know what is right and wrong?

7. What is the meaning of human history?

I often keep these questions close at hand when reading a book or an article. One way this can be done is to simply make yourself a bookmark with these questions on it. Next time you read a book ask these questions to see what kind of worldview the author is expressing in his/her writng.

Both Shaeffer and Sire understood philosophy of life or worldview primarily in terms of abstract rational ideas that people hold about the world and what is the really real. Sire’s definition of worldview in The Universe Next Door is “a set of presuppositions which we hold about the basic make up of our world” (p17). Sire’s definition was my foundation for approaching my worldview and the worldview of others. According to this definition, the primary way of critiquing a worldview is by reviewing and fine tuning your logical thinking about the world. This is what I call doing worldview thinking by abstracting ideas concerning one’s rational thinking alone.

As I began to read the holy fathers and to participate in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, I began to realize that there is much more to a person’s worldview than what is in his logical head. One of the things I started realizing in the Fathers and through praying the Anglican liturgy was that Christianity was primarily a sacramental and incarnational worldview which means that Christianity has to involve matter and not just good rational thinking. (I would now add an ascetical dimension to the worldview of the Fathers.) It was here that I realized that Sire’s worldview definition was reductionistic in the sense that it was purely rationalistic.

I began to search for a worldview that was well-rounded or whole. I wanted a worldview that incorporated all that a human being is – one that included reason but also recognized that man is more than his ideas. I sought to develop and teach an introductory course to the Christian worldview that was reasonable, sacramental, and incarnational.

I ordered a new book by James Sire titled Naming the Elephant. I was surprised to find out that Sire had come to see his worldview definition in The Universe Next Door as inadequate, like I had. His new worldview definition is “a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions which we hold about the basic constitution of reality and provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.” I appreciate Sire’s new definition because it includes not just man’s thinking about the world but man’s heart and his being in the world.

After reading Sire’s book I returned to a book I had not read for a few years by Orthodox author Fr. Alexander Schmemann titled For the Life of the World. This book and some of the works of C.S. Lewis gave me the material I needed for my course concerning a more holistic Christian worldview. It was during my preparation for teaching this course that I started to realize that my worldview was not Anglican but Orthodox. This is a very short summery of my worldview journey. I will try and fill the missing parts of this journey summery on this blog. I will primarily focus on approaching all things worldviewishly.