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...

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...

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).

"...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...

Making Sense in Religious Studies: A Student's Guide to Research and Writing was published in August 2011 and will prove to be an excellent resource for undergraduate students of Religious Studies. The majority of the information in the book will also be useful to non-Religious Studies students as the book also provides advice on the basics of university life and students' academic responsibilities. This Oxford University Press publication authored by Margot Northey, Bradford A. Anderson, and Joel N. Lohr introduces students to university and higher education in the first three chapters, including time management and writing. General information that will be useful to most university students includes chapters on writing essays, writing book reviews, studying for and taking tests, giving oral presentations, documenting sources, common grammatical errors, and more. The chapter on reading religious texts is clearly specific to Religious Studies, as are most of the examples in t...

I recently saw this book listed in the Wipf & Stock new releases email. The book is a series of essays on the relationship of theology and the humanities in the university. The editors of the volume, Christopher Craig Brittain and Francesca Murphy both have ties to the University of Aberdeen. Brittain currently is a lecturer in theology there, while Murphy has only recently left her post as Reader in Theology at Aberdeen to take the post at Notre Dame. (The subtitle Initium Sapientiae Timor Domini 'Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom' is the moto of the University of Aberdeen). These essays with their Aberdeen connection and also the topic of the place of theology in the humanities and the university are of interest to me. I hope to soon read this volume. The description of the the book is as follows: "This book discusses the relationship between theology and the humanities and their shared significance within contemporary universities. Taking up this com...