Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Millions of young Christ-followers began their university journey this month.  How will they fare with regard to their worldview and overall approach to life?  Statistics [Read more →]

Marana (my wife) and I recently returned from a cruise vacation to the Bahamas, the purpose of which was to celebrate the completion of the Ph.D. that I started back in the fall of 2000.  Fantastic experience (the cruise, that is); ready to go back.  One afternoon a small advertisement on the wall of the men’s room caught my eye:  “Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.”  Of course Royal Carribbean’s [Read more →]

Each year Del Tackett, author of the Truth Project, comes to facilitate student learning.  I’m always struck by his genuine concern for the millennial generation and the unique challenges faced by its emerging leaders.  Here are his reflections following his spring 2010 visit.

About a year ago one of our students asked me a question that I thought ranked fairly high on the profundity scale, especially given that she was only 18 years old.  “What are the things we do on this earth that we will take with us into eternity?”  As she clarified her question, I discovered that it had been prompted by the previous evening’s outside-the-classroom learning experience: a half-hour stroll through a graveyard.  Her reflections on that experience revealed that she was seeking desperately to understand [Read more →]

Church-related liberal arts colleges historically tack to the left and eventually separate from their founding denominations.  James Burtchaell, a Catholic scholar and author of The Dying of the Light:  The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), has outlined the way in which this usually takes place.  How much of this accurately represents a college or university near you?  As one of my graduate mentors would often say, “you be the judge.”  JDB

James Burtchaell’s 9 steps of Alienation in Christian Higher Education

1. A period of stagnation is evident in the life of the institution; a dynamic typically attributed to “depressive influence” by the institution’s sponsoring denomination.  This is then often followed by a time of social unrest and intellectual turbulence in both the denomination and the institution, because [Read more →]

This post is courtesy of Bethany Pickett, IMPACT 360 alumna from the class of ’09  She is currently working on her B.A. at The King’s College in NYC. Nice going Bethany.  -JDB

Last week, I found out Richard Dawkins was going to be speaking at a local Barnes and Noble. I couldn’t miss this opportunity to hear him speak in person. To get in, you had to buy his newest book, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.” I was already planning on buying the book, so this was ideal. I got there at 4:30 and waited in line to [Read more →]

The hot-off-the press issue of the Biola magazine (I did my M.A. at Biola U in CA) features a provocative article–”Is Prayer a Priority in a Twitter World?”  It references the recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life which shows that younger folks (ages 18-29) are the least likely group of American adults to pray on a daily basis–only 48% actually.  For millennials whose primary method of communicating is texting and tweeting, it’s no surprise that this is the case.  One of the Biola profs quoted in the article observes that “many young people have been conditioned to treat prayer as a bite-sized activity to squeeze into their lives–and have difficulties spending extended amounts of time in prayer.”

“As the minimum function of the administrator is ordering the means, so his highest function is discovering and clarifying and holding before his institution the vision of the end. As the qualifications for the administrator’s minimum function are courage, fortitude, justice, and prudence, so the qualification for his highest function is philosophical wisdom.

It is one thing to get things done. It is another to make them last.”

Robert M Hutchins, “The Administrator: Leader or Officeholder?” in Freedom, Education and the Fund: Essays and Addresses, 1946-1956 (New York: Meridian Books, 1956).

“…a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not.  To be ignorant and simple now–not to be able to meet enemies on their own ground–would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defence but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.  Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy must be answered.”

-C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time” (1939).

As I continue to work my way through the Hitchens book god is not Great (2007), I’m simultaneously trudging through a recent work by one of Hitchens fellow New-Yorkers, Rev. Tim Keller. It’s pretty clear that Keller, pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, churned out The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008) at least in part due to the rise of the growing corpus of literature coming from the leaders of the New Atheism, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and yes, my favorite “new” atheist club-member Christopher Hitchens. One of Hitchens arguments against the probability of the existence of an omnibenevolent God is captured [Read more →]