Foundational Prose

Foundational Prose // ONE HUNDRED IMPORTANT READINGS TO FOSTER VITAL CONVERSATIONS

As you enter Covenant Christian High School, turn right and walk a bit around the commons railing, then go right once more through the double-doors of the library; once inside you’ll find a handmade bookshelf set apart from the rest housing a collection of works. This is the Covenant 100, a set of books that humbly attempts to be a complete compilation of the essential works that speak to the formation of a Christian worldview. It is a congregation of continually critiqued books that attempts to exemplify the best collection of works to aid its readers in answering all of the important questions of the Christian life.

Academic Dean David Trujillo recalls the Covenant 100 starting as an initiative for the whole school to commit to in-depth worldview education. Former Principal and CEO Bryan Hudson put the task to a few teachers to hunker down and develop a refined worldview curriculum for Covenant students. Starting with Joseph Campbell’s Eight Issues of Man, Trujillo extensively researched different spiritual, anthropological, and pastoral perspectives on the essential questions that must be answered for a full life with God. “A good worldview is founded on Scripture, but we realized we needed to receive and draw upon strong Christian voices from throughout the centuries and across the globe; we humbly pursued to create a list of what are the most important texts that answer the most important questions in developing a worldview,” said Trujillo.

The list of eight issues expanded a bit and became Life’s Universal Questions, a framework that still informs many pedagogical methods in the humanities at Covenant. Organized under 12 broad categories, these 15 questions would be the basis for Covenant’s worldview curriculum, especially, but not exclusively, in the capstone Senior Worldview class.

As the set of questions solidified and students embarked on academic and formational quests to answer them, Trujillo continually found himself gathering resources for students as they developed questions about classroom discussions and composed complex worldview papers and presentations. Trujillo said, “I was asking students to investigate answers for those questions, using Scripture and Christian mentors like C.S. Lewis, and I found they needed a lot of help in where to get started, so to maximize their time and research I created a starting bibliography. It was a place to start, but it became clear that gathering library materials was essential.”

So in its early days, the first form of what would become the Covenant 100 was simply a teacherprepared bibliography for students who were asked to read portions of of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis or The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. As resources were available, Covenant started gathering books from the growing list. And as Covenant worked to gather books and continue building its Biblical and Theological Studies curriculum with the works, many former students would come back for more.

Many alumni who had gone through the Worldview class and matriculated would contact their former Bible teachers and ask for the book list they had encountered senior year or they would ask for more resources to continue being well-read in Christian thought and perspectives. This was further evidence to all invested in developing the Covenant 100 that the list was bigger than a school’s worldview curriculum. It could be a community centerpoint that would unite fellow believers to commune over God’s truth through the lenses these mentor texts would provide.

In 2015, after years of consideration and planning, the first iteration of the Covenant 100 found its home in the Covenant library. Finally there were tangible, in-house copies of all of the books that comprise this special collection. Organized by question-group categories, four shelves of the Brad Spencer custom-made bookshelf holds works from writers like St. Augustine, Madeline L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, among many, many others. They are constantly housed in our library, so they cannot be checked out. This ensures the continual care and curation of the collection. Covenant faculty, staff, and students have all come to appreciate that there is something special about that bookcase in the library.

The Covenant 100 has its own space for study and reflection reserved in the Library Media Center.

As the de-facto leader on the project, Trujillo said that the ultimate vision for the collection is to make a resource list of works that mentor our students, alumni, and community through life in Christian thinking and Christian living, to empower them to be a voice in their community, and to bring others into this depth of thinking about how the Christian worldview impacts their lives. “We have a long way to go in that reality,” Trujillo admits, “but to have a larger group of alumni interacting with this list and introducing it to people in their community, that they allow this list to mentor them through life, pass it along, inform their lives, this list can be a great tool for that. We’re building lifelong learners, preparing them for scholarship, leadership, and aiming to give a perspective not only on what it means to be Christian but also a flourishing human being.”