Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Next Generation Culture-Changers are Ready…really?

John B. — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:46:52 +0000

See my recent post on this on the Touchstone magazine blogsite, “Mere Comments.” JDB

The Fulcrum of Desire

John B. — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:20:14 +0000

Having heard much about James K.A. Smith’s 2009 book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, and having recently received a nudge from a friend and colleague to pull the trigger, I went ahead and began digging in. Thus far I’ve not been disappointed. This book is particularly suited to Christ-followers whose vocation is in some way related to raising up the next generation of leaders–that is, how to educate them in the most deeply meaningful sense of the term. Much of what we do in Christian higher education is based on the correct notion that we are rational beings. We ought not give ground on that. However, Smith reminds us of what Augustine trumpeted long ago, namely, that we are also pre-rational beings. We discover the world by following the various loves that we develop. So how do we come to love what is good, right, and true? How, in other words, do we come to desire the things that will lead us to flourish as both citizens of heaven and earth in the way our Creator intended? Smith offers a hint of the kind of formation we ought to be about as we form the next generation of leaders: ”Our habits thus constitute the fulcrum of our desire: they are the hinge that ‘turns’ our heart, our love, such that it is predisposed to be aimed in certain directions.”

The Future of High School Education

John B. — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 13:30:54 +0000

A recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution has me thinking. See my post on the Touchstone Magazine blogsite. JDB

The Puritan work ethic: inherent value in non-spiritual work?

John B. — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 22:54:00 +0000

As I’ve been making my way through professor Leland Ryken’s (father of current Wheaton College president Phillip Ryken) book Redeeming the Time: A Christian Approach to Work and Leisure, I’ve been reminded once again of the importance of viewing life holistically. The Puritans certainly emphasized this, and sometimes in ways that shake our sensibilities as evangelical Protestants (for those of us who fall in this category) who have assumed for so long that the main work we are to accomplish in this world is to prepare–and prepare others–for the next world…and not worry so much with the here and now. On this view, if you have “secular” or “civil” employment, you do well to ask God to take you into full-time ministry, or at the very least see your current station mainly as a way to evangelize the lost. This is the unfortunate and theologically truncated narrative adopted by so many faithful believers today, which resulted from the fundamentalist-modernist battles of the early twentieth century. Now, I’m all for evangelizing the lost, but we do well to probe a little more deeply into our history. The Puritans weren’t perfect, but they were for evangelism as well. Furthermore, their thinking pre-dates that of the fundamentalists by a couple hundred years, and in general is far more sophisticated. Their work ethic suggests something else, namely an endorsement of “secular” and “civil” work. Ryken quotes the Puritan Thomas Shepard as saying: “As it is a sin to nourish worldly thoughts when God set you a work in spiritual, heavenly employments, so it is…as great a sin to suffer yourself to be distracted to spiritual thoughts, when God sets you on work in civil…employments.”

-Quote from Thomas Shepard, Certain Select Cases Resolved, in The Works of Thomas Shepard (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1:306.

Evil & the Art of Life

John B. — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:05:12 +0000

A number of IMPACT 360 alumni and other former students came to mind when I read this snippet from C.S. Lewis today: “But I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”

-from “Why I am not a Pacifist” (The Weight of Glory)

Old Stuff

John B. — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:58:10 +0000

Summer is the time of year that professors, student life administrators, and mentors get Facebook messages and calls from students who have deeply impacted their lives both spiritually and intellectually over the course of the just-finished academic year. They want to share how life is going in the interim. It is the same for us at IMPACT 360. Students come in early September, experience transformational change intellectually and spiritually that most never thought possible, get commissioned in May, and then they’re off and running–equipped and energized to be a force for change on their respective college campuses. Except…maybe not. Sure, there IS a lasting change in their lives. But, what surprises some students in the summer months, whether they’re working, taking gen ed courses at home, or whatever, is when they relapse into some of their old tendencies that they thought they had soundly beaten. The old environment, or one that at least is familiar to it, brings up old stuff. And this reality isn’t just one unique to college students. The rest of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, also face this in our journeys. Lasting transformation requires time in the garden as well as the desert. But why?

C.S. Lewis put it this way: “…we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected) he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along–illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation–he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.” -from Mere Christianity

Missional Narcissism

John B. — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 01:03:39 +0000

One of IMPACT 360′s regular guest professors, Dr. Anthony Bradley, who is currently professor of Theology and Ethics at The King’s College in NYC, has a great post on an aspect of leadership that is almost never discussed–the temptation to turn our supposedly missional, Kingdom-minded organizations into idols.

The Terminator (for real)

John B. — Tue, 17 May 2011 00:52:08 +0000

This spring an article in Time magazine entitled “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal” really woke me up. For years I’ve used the late Harvard political philosopher Robert Nozick’s thought experiment called “the experience machine” (found in Nozick’s book Anarchy, State, & Utopia) to generate discussion with my students and to ask a few key questions about what it means to be human, and how the best college education will make that question the stackpole around which all other questions are gathered. Philosophy of education aside for the moment, the Time article will jolt anyone who thought that Schwarzeneggar’s brand was a mere fiction relegated to our DVD libraries. If this isn’t a case for young, clear-minded Christian thinkers to go and get Ph.D.’s in neuroscience and philosophy of mind from the best universities in the world, I don’t know what is.

Advice to new college grads

John B. — Thu, 05 May 2011 11:37:14 +0000

My friend and colleague Hunter Baker, Assoc. Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Union University, has some sound counsel for freshly-minted college grads in his recent post.

http://hunterbaker.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/advice-to-new-graduates-in-recessionary-times/

Culture-Making

John B. — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:41:36 +0000

This week Trent Wilbanks and I are team teaching our final module for the academic year. Cultural transformation is the topic, and Andy Crouch’s book Culture Making is the backbone text. Concept of the week? Power. Crouch says that cultural power is “the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good.” As it turns out, this concept is related to our various callings. More to come on this in future posts.