NEW FOR 1968

Beginning next month this journal enters its tenth year. The theme for Volume 10 will be The Quest of God, which will be a study of God’s benevolent pursuit for the heart of man. Our thesis will be that God is “the Hound of Heaven” who is persistently in search of man, and that in one way or another each person at some point in life has a confrontation with God. God’s quest of us involves, of course, the whole gamut of human experience, from Adam to Christ and from the dawn of civilization to the present. The quest is as old as Mesopotamia and as new as Tel Aviv.

Some of the possible subjects of the series are natural religion, the mission of philosophy, the Bible, revelation and inspiration, the nature of religion, the gospel. The series will run all year.

Another series for the year which will further explore our theme will be “God and Culture,” the point being to show how God reveals Himself or exercise His will in all areas of human concern. My wife Ouida is joining me in these monthly visits we will be making to your house. We often read aloud to each other after retiring in the evening, and we have been continually impressed with the evidence of God’s presence in the experiences of men from all walks of life whose stories sometimes get into print. We thus see God’s hand in the world’s great literature, and we want to share with you some of our conclusions.

Surely God’s quest of man is in science, education, medicine, government, music, and all other areas of human concern. Indeed, human concerns are also the concerns of God. We believe that God has much to teach as we tune our ears to His voice in all of culture. Much of what we share with you will be from biographies of men who have made the world different. We are presently reading the story of a famous composer and the autobiography of a courageous U. S. diplomat. We plan also to read the biographies of Einstein and Freud, and perhaps Dag Hammarskjold of the United Nations, and still others from various fields. In all this reading Ouida and I will be asking ourselves: In what way does God reveal Himself in the experiences of this man? Or this question, which may not really be different: What are the spiritual values to be gleaned from this person’s life?

Ouida is good at this kind of thing, perhaps because she is so good to start with. She wants me to do the actual writing in this series on “God and Culture,” but I’ll be passing along to you her insights. So we hope you’ll pull up a chair and join us.

There will also be space for a lot of other articles and ideas from various writers. That veteran ace writer, Robert Meyers, will still be around, and we’ll have that Ph.D. that wears the pseudonym. We will also continue to follow the policy of providing space for the fellows who have difficulty being heard through other means, and some of the younger fellows who often have something to say.

All of this will finally be placed in book form under the title The Quest of God and will sell for 3.00, as do the first two volumes, Resources of Power (1966) and Things That Matter Most (1967).