Divinity United

There is an excellent piece entitled "Philosopher Kings: Business Leaders would benefit from studying great writers" in the Schumpeter column of the October 4th 2014 Economist. The article is a lament with some poignant comments arguing that business leaders would be better off spending weekends reading great books and discussing big ideas with others rather than doing team building exercises or experiencing leadership skills on a kayak trip. The call is for business leaders to take some "inward-bound" courses instead of the typical outward-bound courses. I think that the piece offers some great advice, and I think that the advice shouldn't just be taken by business leaders. Everyone in every walk of life could use a few big ideas and read a great book or two. Connecting with the broader ideas of what humanity is and what culture is can expand our horizons and challenge us to rethink our own narrow parts of the world. If a business leader can be encourage to...

In case you missed it, there was an excellent piece on higher education by Reinhard Hütter in the November 2013 issue of First Things entitled " Polytechnic Utiliversity: Putting the Universal Back in University ." Hütter offered a thoughtful and challenging look at the ideal set out by John Henry Newman about what a university should be, and  Hütter compared this with the utilitarian, professionally focused institution that the larger universities have become. The second paragraph of the essay gives you the sense of his perspective: "The ideal of a liberal education that carries its end in its very practice has been supplanted by an efficiency-driven program of knowledge making and a respective training in the communicative, mathematical, and scientific skills necessary for contributing to this knowledge making and applying it to ends dictated by individual and collective desires. The university has morphed into a polytechnicum with a functionalized, propaede...

Here is the concluding quote from a recent study by Kuznekoff and Titsworth on the use of texting and social media posts by students in the classroom: ". . . students who use their mobile phones during class lectures tend to write down less information, recall less information, and perform worse on a multiple-choice test than those students who abstain from using their mobile phones during class." Cited from,  J. H. Kuznekoff and S. Titsworth,"The Impact of Mobile Phone Usage on Student Learning." Communication Education, 62.3 (2013): 233-252 at 251. Not any surprise here. This is also why texting and driving are illegal in most places. Some further illuminating quotes from the study are as follows: "The practical implication stemming from the tests surrounding hypothesis 2 is that students who were actively texting/posting simply recalled less information than students who were not texting/posting. Specifically, students in the control group...

Ran across this post on the value of recreational reading as important and a valuable human activity. There is some wonderful discussion of P.G. Wodehouse, one of my favorite authors, as an example of excellent recreational reading. The post and Wodehouse are worth some time of recreational reading.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is sponsoring a student presentation initiative of what makes the humanities and social sciences great. Students can make a three minute video or other social media presentation and compete Canada-wide for 25 finalist spots. More information below: SSHRC launches student contest to promote liberal arts research   The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has launched a contest that challenges PSE (post-secondary) students to show Canadians how liberal arts research is “affecting our lives, our world and our future prosperity.” SSHRC is accepting submissions from November 1 to January 15 in the form of a 3-minute pitch via podcast, op-ed, video, or infographic. The top 25 finalists will receive registration and accommodation at SSHRC’s Congress 2014 conference in May, at which they will promote their project and participate in a research communications workshop. 5 jury-chosen presenters will the...

Dr. Thomas Albert Howard of Gordon College in Wenham, Mass recently wrote a article for Inside Higher Ed entitled "The Promise of Religious Colleges."  Howard argues that the current challenges facing higher education actually offer religious institutions of higher education "a propitious opportunity." The positives as he states them are, first, that religious institutions are still about the personal, about the interaction between faculty and students not just in the classroom but also, and almost more importantly, outside the classroom. The discussion of things that matter and the mentoring that occurs at these institutions is something that cannot be offered in the same way or at all at larger universities. Second, codes of conduct still exist are religious institutions and need not seem antiquated. Third, these universities and colleges focus on vocation and calling and not career. The religious institutions challenge students to shape their lives and fu...

Here is a brief excerpt from Robert H. Gundry's essay "Learning for Spirituality" which is in his new book Extracurriculars: Teaching Christianly Outside Class. It was originally an address given in chapel at Westmont College where Gundry is Professor Emeritus and Scholar-in-Residence. "...my point...is not to work Christianity into your business. It's not to work spirituality into your learning. You should, of course. You should make your learning an act of worship by putting a Christian perspective on the literature you study, on the art, on the psychology, on the sociology, the political science--on whatever you study. Sometimes it'll be easy to do, sometimes hard to do. How do you put a Christian perspective on math? I don't know. Maybe our math teachers can tell us. But this morning isn't about putting learning into spirituality, about infusing our learning with spirituality. It's the other way around. It's about putting learning into ...

James McGrath just tweeted a link to this article by Michael Zimmerman at the Huffington Post . It is a great piece on the value of the liberal arts, and it highlights how employers actually want exactly what liberal arts grads have to offer. The exerpt from the winner of the student essay...superb! This is why I teach undergraduates at a liberal arts institution. This is why I believe the liberal arts is the best education on offer. Anyone for a Canadian Consortium for the Liberal Arts? I am all for it.

Mark Sargent has been provost at Westmont College now for over a year. The following is a long excerpt on the value of Christian Liberal Arts Education from an article in the Westmont Magazine entitled "A Few Words from Mark Sargent" (Winter 2012). They are great words and reminders about what the liberal arts is and how important this sort of education has been and will continue to be. The Value of Christian Liberal Arts Education During my college years I often made long bicycle trips with friends along the California coast. For cyclists, few stretches of the road are more demanding than the Big Sur coastline, where the mountains press against the sea. For 70 miles the highway clings to precipitous cliffs, mixing sharp climbs and rapid descents. That stage of the journey requires full concentration on the thin white line along the road’s edge as you weave through the fallen shale and pine branches and avoid nervous drivers.Yet every now and then, after a long ...

Great quote from Arthur F. Holmes from his classic The Idea of a Christian College : "College is for education, the liberal arts college for a liberal education, and the Christian college for a Christian education. These are the basics to which we must get back. To sell college primarily on some other basis is to operate under false pretenses; and to start into college for some other reason is to ask for frustrations. We must therefore come to see education as a Christian calling, we must explore what ‘liberal education’ means and how it is affected by the Christian’s task" (p. 6).

Jeremy Begbie will be in Toronto giving a Performance Lecture entitled "The Sound of Freedom: The Music of Liberation" on March 20, 2013 at 3-4:30 pm. Wycliffe College is hosting this event at the TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning, Conservatory Theatre, 273 Bloor Street West, Toronto. Having seen him lecture before, his combination of theology and the arts is not something to miss.   Further details here .

These quotes are from the Introduction to his excellent book Why Choose the Liberal Arts? "The liberal arts build on one of the oldest ideals of learning which Socrates put into practice in ancient Greece. For Socrates it was clear that we learn more effectively when we pursue questions ourselves and seek the answers ourselves, when we embody what educators call 'active learning.' The student is actively engaged in the learning process, asking questions, being asked questions, pursuing often elusive answers in dialogue with others. Knowledge cannot simply be poured, like water, from one larger container into an emptier one ( Symposium 175d). Socrates also made it clear that learning is most important and most successful when students are engaged in meaningful discussions, asking questions that will determine who they are and what they think about life's most significant issues. For example, what is human excellence? What is friendship? love? courage? How do we lear...

"...the greatest hope for Christian learning in our age, or in any age, lies not primarily in heightened activity, in better funding, or in strategizing for the tasks at hand--though all these matters play an important part. Rather, the great hope for Christian learning is to delve deeper into the Christian faith itself. And going deeper into the Christian faith means, in the end, learning more of Jesus Christ."  Mark A. Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind,  22.

"...we use the terms 'college' and 'university' inchangeably. 'She went to Michigan,' we say, or 'he goes to Oberlin'--not bothering with the noun that follows the name, as if a college and a university were the same thing. They are not. They are, to be sure, interconnected (most college teachers nowadays hold an advanced university degree), and a college may exist as a division or 'school' within in university. But a college and a university have--or should have--different purposes. The former is about transmitting knowledge of and from the past to undergraduate students so that they may draw upon it as a living resource in the future. The latter is mainly an array of research activities conducted by faculty and graduate students with the aim of creating new knowledge in order to supercede the past."    --   Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 2. The terminolog...

I recently finished reading Susan VanZanten's, Joining the Mission: A Guide for (Mainly) New Faculty (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), and I can guarantee that it will not be the last time I read it.  Joining the Mission is primarily directed toward faculty who are about to or have recently begun teaching at "one of the nine hundred religiously affiliated colleges or universities in the United States, which collectively enroll abour 1.5 million students annually" (vi). While providing the most advice for new faculty, there is plenty of career advice for those who have been teaching at one of these institutions for most of their careers. VanZanten's title derives from one of her arguments: that faculty need to join the mission of the institution at which they teach. The chapter titles are as follows: 1. What is a Mission-Driven Institution? 2. A Very Brief History of Western Higher Education 3. Teaching: Call and Response 4. Teaching: Brick by Brick 5. The Fai...

"...for the love of letters, and the benefit of reading, are bounded, not by the time spent at school, but by the extent of life."  -- Quintilian, Institutio oratorio , 1.8.12. A great little reminder that learning is not about formal education, but learning is for life.

The cover story of Christianity Today's  March 2012 is an article by Perry L. Glanzer entitled: "The Missing Factor in Higher Education: How Christian Universities are Unique, and How They Can Stay That Way."  Glanzer makes an excellent case for the Christian university and it is a reminder for those of us working in Christian higher education about what makes us different and why what we do is valuable. Glanzer argues that teaching morals, wisdom, and character development are often what is missing at secular or research universities. The focus in larger, research universities is on the transfer of knowledge or the content of subjects. The smaller, Christian liberal arts universities have placed emphasis on the pursuit of truth and wisdom, along with the development of the entire individual rather than on purely emphasizing expertise in a specific subject area He warns that Christian universities could lose this strength by focusing on expertise versus on pursuing w...

Quintilian in Institutio oratoria II.3: "For my part, I do not consider a man a real teacher if he is unwilling to teach little things. But I argue that the ablest teachers can teach little things best, if they will: first, because it is likely that he who excels others in eloquence, has gained the most accurate knowledge of the means by which men attain eloquence; second, because method, which, with the best qualified instructors, is always plainest, is of great efficacy in teaching; and lastly, because no man rises to such a height in greater things that the lesser fade entirely from his view."

In the Economist's The World in 2012 edition there is an interesting piece by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, entitled "Sharing to the power of 2012" (p. 50). She opens by talking about Mark Zuckerberg's "law of sharing." This "law" is Zuckerberg's assertion that every year the amount of information shared digitally will double. She says, "Around the globe, people will share more and more of their lives online, transforming relationships on every level--personal, commercial and institutional." In the article she talks about the positives of sharing and how organ donors have been found through sharing information on social media and how money has been raised for charity. (However, there wasn't any mention of the people who have had their homes broken into when they share the dates of their holiday.) So there are some positive aspects of social media. The Arab Spring is an excellent example. One of San...