Your Mind Matters: The Place of the Mind in the Christian Life

"Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service," writes John Stott. "If we do not use the mind which God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality."While Christians have had a long heritage of rigorous scholarship and careful thinking, some circles still view the intellect with suspicion or even as contradictory to Christian faith. And many non-Christians are quick to label Christians as anti-intellectual and obscurantist. But this need not be so. In this classic introduction to Christian thinking, John Stott makes a forceful appeal for Christian discipleship that engages the mind as well as the heart.

Mark A. Noll (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) is Francis McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is advisory editor for Books Culture and subeditor for the new Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Noll's main academic interests concern the interaction of Christianity and culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American societies. He has published articles and reviews on a wide variety of subjects involving Christianity in modern history. Some of his many books include The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Is the Reformation Over?, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys and The Old Religion in a New World.

John Stott is known worldwide as a preacher, evangelist and communicator of Scripture. For many years he served as rector of All Souls Church in London, where he carried out an effective urban pastoral ministry. His many books, including Basic Christianity and The Cross of Christ, have sold millions of copies around the world and in dozens of languages. Stott was honored by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World."