At a wedding I attended 50 years ago, the bride's brother sang a love song, "At Dawning." I was the groom, and have since forgotten the lyrics. But even the words of the title have a nice sound.

Dawn is a gorgeous time of day. Drenched in pastel beauty, mist, and quiet, it comes very softly, even as the freeways begin their hum of first traffic. For ships at sea, it is a time to do important navigational work. Sailors call it "morning twilight."

And though the twenty-first century is still a few heartbeats away, there's a feeling its dawn has already begun. Already we are standing at the edge of tomorrow looking steadily across a narrowing divide.

When Eugene Carson Blake was a chief spokesperson for Protestant Christianity in the early sixties, he made a trip to Korea where he visited a numb…