My Journey through the Holy Land
It was November 1991. By this stage it was all arranged that my wife and I would be spending our sabbatical year in Israel and that we would live in Jerusalem. I was on e-mail when I received the message “I have your apartment arranged for you; you have an address in Jerusalem.” I remember sitting back in my office chair and pondering “we have an address in Jerusalem; this is the Holy City, the City of the Great King, and we have an address there!” Read More…
Posted in Faith & Culture
Virtues & Vices of Human Creatures from Steven Bouma-Prediger, Hope College
Spirit Bear in Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest
Respect & Receptivity: If life in all its diversity is a gift from a benevolent Creator, we should respect its innate, intrinsic and precious value—its creational integrity. Biodiversity (a rich and full flourishing fittedness) is an intended result of God’s wise and orderly creative activity. We as the human dimension of creation are only one species among multitudes, and so we should cultivate the earth in harmony with other creatures, so that we can all sing a symphony of God’s praises together (Psalms 104; 148).
Posted in Science Reflections, Stewardship
I want to introduce some profound ideas through quotes on the false and true self from Parker Palmer, a brilliant Quaker educator. They are from his book Let Your Life Speak which I read summer of 2011. I trust you will resonate and see their relevance to our discussion on the identity formation of graduate students. Graduate students are not a tabula rasa (blank slate); they are all subjects in process (Julia Kristeva), being formed and shaped by various forces, relationships, politics, experiences and ideas. Read More…
What are the implications of the incarnation (God with us) for graduate students, one of the central doctrines of the Christian faith. What of their identity, their posture and their voice on campus? Incarnation is “where God’s eternity and creation’s temporality meet” (D. Stephen Long, Speaking of God, p. 86). There is no simple answer, but it is great territory to explore, good sod to turn over. There is a language to recover, golden insight and a new experience of self to be discovered. Read More…
Dualling Texts: the Postmodern Self & Judeo-Christian Scripture
This is not a simple or straightforward reflection; it proceeds more by way of an upward spiral. It draws on the school of thought that looks at the self as text, beginning with Wilhelm Dilthey. Nietzsche also loved the language of text; perhaps to an extreme, he claimed that interpretation goes all the way down—there are no facts, only interpretations. There is a sense in which we humans are a text, that is, open for interpretation. We are not reducible to mere factuality. How do we read our life experience, we the self-interpreting creatures who are obsessed with making sense of our lives? Do we not interpret ourselves as we tell our story even as we share with a colleague or a friend? Read More…
Posted in Faith & Culture, GCU Personality, Seeker Corner
Reprint from PAUL DAVIES (thought provocative article on the nature of science and the laws of physics)
The New York Times, November 24, 2007
Tempe, Arizona.
SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue. The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. Read More…
Posted in Science Reflections, Seeker Corner
Promising New Book Release from IVP Academic
Incarnational Humanism: a philosophy of culture for the church in the world. IVP Academic, 2012. by Jens Zimmerman, Canada Research Chair of Interpretation, Religion and Culture in Dept. of English, Trinity Western University
Caption: Having left its Christian roots behind, the West faces a moral, spiritual and intellectual crisis. It has little left to maintain its legacy of reason, freedom, human dignity and democracy. Far from capitulating, Jens Zimmerman believes the church has a new opportunity to speak a surprising word into the postmodern situation–a word grounded in the incarnation itself. Retrieving an ancient Christian humanism for our time, he draws on the rich resources found in Scripture and its theological interpreters ranging from Irenaeus and Augustine to de Lubac and Bonhoeffer.
Dr Zimmerman is an upcoming UBC GFCF speaker in February 2013 http://ubcgfcf.com
Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture
On this post, I would like to build a resource of available scholarships or fellowships available to graduate students. The hope is that it will help complement the grants that the university now offers. We can all participate in adding information here. My GCU focus will be help for projects that encourage integration of faith & scholarship. Faculty can help us with this as well. I am thinking that this will give you time out to write that extra paper or book or develop a pilot project during your grad program that has implications for an NGO or church health or Christian political ideas. You can find the website for these organizations and search out their parameters. Feeling creative yet?
Mustard Seed Foundation Harvey Fellows Program
Stanford Reid Foundation (Guelph, Ont.)
Lilly Foundation
Templeton Foundation of Science & Religion (USA)
Commonwealth Scholarships
more to come…
Posted in Grad Student Strategies
The Virtuous Community
What kind of people form a virtuous community? How do we locate ourselves with respect to the good? What do wisdom, courage and hope, benevolence and love have to do with scholarship? What do moderation, self-restraint and frugality, patience and gratitude have to do with academic excellence, business acumen or scientific brilliance? Can we truly flourish if we live, work and love virtuously? Can virtue inform our academic vision? Our vision shapes our goals and actions day to day. Many of us will know of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue which decried the cultural loss of this ancient language of virtue; in its place late modernity have substituted the Nietzschean/Weberian language of posited values. Is this wise and fruitful? Read More…
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