Fides Quaerens Intellectum

If our universities are to become more than professional schools, their rationalism needs to be in dialogue with other “traditions of inquiry.” For the most important matters in life include such matters as hope, depression, trust, purpose, and wisdom.  If secularism purges such concerns from the curriculum for lack of a way to address them, the public may conclude that the football team really is the most important part of the university.  But if they are taken up, we will find ourselves using terms that seem to belong in a religious discourse.  We have dodged this issue by saying that true, good, just, are all political, meaning that they can’t be discussed but only voted on.  But in fact they could be discussed if our discussions were to recognize a dimension of ultimacy.  It will do wonders in drawing attention and respect to our universities.  And it ought to make religion itself a less frivolous thing than it has become.

~C. John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2006):  22.

Last week at IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net) we had the privilege of hosting our first guest professor for the year, Dr. JP Moreland (http://www.talbot.edu/faculty/faculty_profiles/profile.cfm?n=jp_moreland).  A Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology (Biola University, CA;), Moreland taught and mentored none other than yours truly during the years 1997-1999.  Those two years were a critically formative time for me with respect to my own worldview as well as in my new marriage, and his three-day teaching session last week reminded just how influential he was on me.  [Read more →]

“Who stands fast?

…the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. 

Where are these responsible people?” 

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Over the years I have consistently been amazed at a particular organizational dynamic that emerges within nonprofits, and how that dynamic drives–and in some cases determines–hiring decisions.  That dynamic is urgency.  “Let’s get someone to fill the position asap!”  Just get a body in there.  Interestingly, urgency in these situations often breeds passivity.  Far too often leaders and managers are on autopilot in the way they think about hiring.  Write up a job ad, post it on the website and a few other places and let’s see who applies.  In most cases, a new hire should be here in 2-3 months if we get a decent stack of resumes’.  What?!! [Read more →]

The past 10 days has been one of the most exhilarating travel experiences of my life.  As I write this blog entry  I’m sitting in the middle of Budapest, Hungary, at the regional headquarters of the International Mission Board (IMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention.  Eric Turner (IMPACT 360 Associate director for operations) and I have been traveling around central Europe visiting with missionaries from the IMB who will host our students for their month-long international service experience in January ‘08.  Site visits have included three cities in Hungary (including Budapest), two cities in Czech Republic (including Prague) and Bratislava, Slovakia.  We were also able to take a day trip to Vienna, Austria.  Amazing! This was my first trip to this part of the world, and I’m already looking forward to the next one. [Read more →]

Since I started graduate school in 1997 I’ve appreciated the thoughtfulness that University of Chicago scholar Jean Bethke Elshtain has brought to bear on seemingly countless topics of faith and culture.  In my most recent wanderings through an as yet unread book on faith and learning in my personal library (although I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I didn’t read it as soon as it hit the store shelves…the editors are two solid guys for whom I worked as a Ph.D. graduate research assistant at Baylor U’s Institute for Faith and Learning), I came across a chapter written by Elshtain entitled “To Serve God Wittily, In the Tangle of One’s Mind.”  The creativity of the title drew me to it, and her insights in one paragraph in particular were too valuable to keep to myself.  [Read more →]

The spirit of an organization is created from the top. 

The proof of the sincerity and seriousness of a management is uncompromising emphasis on integrity of character.  This, above all, has to be symbolized is management’s “people” decisions.  For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets the example and is imitated.  Character is not something one can fool people about.  The people with whom a person works, and especially subordinates, know in a few weeks whether he or she has integrity or not.  They may forgive a person for a great deal; incompetence, ignorance, insecurity, or bad manners.  But they will not forgive a lack of integrity in that person.  Nor will they forgive higher management for choosing him.*

Peter Drucker, The Daily Drucker:  366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done.

A fair portion of my Ph.D. dissertation is on the history of higher education in the United States.  In my research I came across the Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon’s account of the College of New Jersey (e.g., Princeton) where he served as president beginning in 1768.  Given my roles at the Chick-fil-A sponsored IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net) program, Union University (www.uu.edu, where I serve as a visiting professor of philosophy) as well as my new role on the Board of Trustees at my alma mater, the Scottish-namesake institution Erskine College (www.erskine.edu) and Seminary (http://www.erskineseminary.org/), Dr. Witherspoon’s thoughts are particularly apropos.  [Read more →]

The trip came at just the right time. It was late in the semester, April 27, and although I was pleased with the way our inaugural academic year had turned out, I was tired. Marana was in need of a break too. Staying at home with 3 little ones ages 4 and under was a blessing, but she was ready for the short respite that her 10 year college class reunion would bring. We were also grateful that my mom could stay with the kids in LaGrange at our house.

This reunion will be a great time with old friends and maybe we’ll even get a little time to ourselves, I thought. It would be even better if I didn’t have term papers to grade…hmmm…I wonder if my supervisor would mind if I subcontracted this part of my job out to someone else. As we made our way through Atlanta on I-85 North I sat in the passenger seat as Marana drove, hacking away on my 17 inch screen Dell, grading those papers. [Read more →]

“The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education would primarily train people to be able to think in Christian categories…”

-T.S. Eliot