The book is a set of five conference papers and two abstracts published as a record of the author's progress toward a biblically-grounded Christian anthropology.
The first paper grew from one written for a graduate-school theory seminar. It analyzes Genesis prologue myth as an epistemological charter for both rational science and rational morality. It was presented at the 1998 International Congress of Anthropological & Ethnological Sciences at William & Mary.
The second and fourth papers, presented at 2011 and 2018 conferences of the Evangelical Missiological Society, are missiological anthropology. The second analyzes the witch the world over as a token of which biblical idols (all harmless, man-made nothings) are the type. The fourth contrasts Bertrand Russell's view of value with that of the Genesis prologue (in terms of who is king in the realm of value) and explains the author's definitions of culture (as chartered by the cultural mandate) and religion (as grounded in God and fundamentally ontological).
The third paper, presented at the 2014 Society for Applied Anthropology conference at Albuquerque, begins to sketch the author's conception of Christian anthropology (which contrasts not only with Marxist anthropology, cultural materialism, humanistic anthropology, etc., but also, for its grounding in Scripture, with what has been called Christian-perspective anthropology).
The first of two appendices is a version of the 1998 paper rejected from the 1987 American Anthropological Association (AAA) conference program; the second consists of two abstracts, the one rejected from the 1990 AAA conference program, the other written with presentation at a 1990 regional anthropology conference in mind but never submitted.
Together, the book's papers and abstracts provide a record, over a span of thirty-plus years, of significant parts of the author's thinking about a Christian anthropology needfully (for his demands of it), unabashedly (for his scholarly confidence in it) grounded in the Christian bible.
