Divinity United

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...

Thomas Oden has a piece in the April 2012 edition of First Things entitled "Do Not Rashly Tear Asunder: Why the Beleaguered Faithful should stay and reform their churches" (pp. 40-44). He is writing about the specific situation of the United Methodist Church on the issue of ordaining those in same-sex unions. The essay is an argument to those of his fellow members in the Confessing Movement Within the United Methodist Church to remain within the UMC rather than separate. John Wesley serves as an example, since Wesley never left the Church of England and preached a sermon in 1784 entitled "Against Schism". Oden offers a number of poignant quotes from that sermon: "Do not rashly tear asunder the sacred ties which unite you to any Christian society." Oden states: "Wesley admonished those who hastily assumed that separation is a moral virtue: 'They leave a Christian society with as much unconcern as they go out of one room into another. They...w...