At the heart of that revival was a sense that the ancient was a resource for the contemporary—that the past had wisdom for the present.

to be both pressed and stretched, located at the intersection of church and world, past and future, ancient and modern, memory and hope.

historic Christian tradition and the pressing challenges of the present;

Again, consider this an architectural metaphor for the Christian life today. We find ourselves in contested spaces, hearing rival gospels, enticed into competing liturgies.

the Christian public intellectual needs to be a kind of ethnographer, offering a “thick description” of our present,

This is why the temporal question—“What time is it?”—is a necessarily prelude to the discipleship question—“What do we do now?” And the resources for answering that question are ancient.

Everything in this book is animated by the conviction that the tradition of Christian orthodoxy is a gift, not a liability—a resource for the future, not an embarrassment that we should be trying to sweep under the carpet or tuck away in a back room like a crazy uncle.

To live at that intersection is to be caught up in the life of our incarnating God, who at the fullness of time intersected with history and now invites us, ever anew, to be his contemporaries.

We are heirs of “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3) but also enjoined to “become all things to all people, that [we] might by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22 NRSV).