faculty

Review: A Grander Story

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A Grander Story

A Grander Story, Rick Hove and Heather Holleman. Orlando: Cru Press, 2017.

Summary: An invitation to professors and graduate students who are Christians to live for the grand vision of God’s story in their life in higher education, including narratives of six professors, and practical recommendations.

Very simply, this book nails it in casting a vision for Christians called to academia. The writers, associated with a sister ministry to the one I work with set out a vision of lives nobly lived as part of God’s great story. I found myself saying “Amen” on almost every page and thinking of groups of grad students and faculty who would be helped by reading and discussing this book.

The opening four chapters of the book articulate the grander story, the story of God’s redemptive purposes in the world and the grand person of Christ at the heart of the story. Then they turn to discuss the grander being and grander doing that faculty captivated by this vision might experience. It begins with being a different kind of person under a new leader. It extends into all that faculty do in teaching, research, relationships, and service. They invite faculty to consider the metanarratives of their disciplines and the distinctive contributions Christian thought might make in the research questions they explore. This life is also marked by the different ways they engage disagreements and how they serve others.

The second part of the book consists of six narratives by faculty working in different fields: Ken Elzinga in economics, Susan Siaw in psychology, Walter Bradley in mechanical engineering, Phil Bishop in exercise physiology, John Walkup in electrical engineering, and Heather Holleman in English. Their accounts describe their academic work, their relationships with students and how they have had opportunities to witness to Christ with students and peers, opportunities in missions, and participation in faculty groups on their campuses. Heather Holleman’s account was especially striking to me in its narrative of how she intentionally arrives early and prays for each of the students who will be in the seats of her classroom.

The final two chapters summarize these accounts in “best practices” and a concluding chapter that articulates the authors longings for higher education and Christian presence in this arena. The book also includes two appendices dealing with legal questions. Many professors are obeying laws that don’t exist and not availing themselves of the freedoms they have. At the same time, there are appropriate cautions of being aware of policies about use of university emails and facilities.

The book is designed to be read and discussed by graduate students and faculty. Short chapters with many personal examples that readers can identify with are very helpful. Each chapter ends with several discussion questions that could be discussed in a 45 minute luncheon meeting. I also think the book does a great job in casting a vision and offering hope for what can happen in colleges and universities for those in the church who might despair about the “godless university.” Anyone who reads this has to conclude that our colleges and universities and the people who work in them are part of the grander story God is writing.

Books That Have Changed Your Life

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Last Thursday, I had the privilege of spending a wonderful luncheon with a group of believing faculty and staff at The Ohio State University. What made the luncheon wonderful was not simply the good food from our Faculty Club buffet line. Nor was it simply the charming personalities around the table. It was rather hearing from one another about books that had been formative in our spiritual journeys.  With the organizers permission, I am sharing the list* (to which I contributed a few titles). I’ve added Amazon links so you can learn more about any titles that sound interesting.

Title, Author(s)

Four Portraits, One Jesus, Mark Strauss

Names of God, Mary Foxwell Loeks

Women at Southern: A Walk Through Psalms, Jaye Martin, Alyssa Caudill, and Sharon Beougher (link is to a blog with ordering information, one of our staff contributed to this book)

Tales of the Kingdom, David and Karen Mains

Tales of Resistance, David and Karen Mains

Tales of Restoration, David and Karen Mains

Death by Suburb, David L. Goetz

The Parable of Joy, Michael Card

How to Know God Exists, Ray Comfort

Origins, Ariel Roth

The Radical Disciple, John Stott

Praying the Psalms, Thomas Merton

The Robe, Lloyd C. Douglas

The Insanity of God, Nik Ripken and Gregg Lewis

The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Cross of Christ, John Stott

Knowing God, J. I. Packer

Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoffer

Daring to Draw Near, John White

Life of the Beloved, Henri J. M. Nouwen

The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman

Christianity: The Faith that Makes Sense, Dennis McCallum

The Question of God, Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.

A Skeptic’s Search for God, Ralph O. Muncaster

One of the delights in such times is what you learn about people by the books they share. For one person, it is the chronicle of their seminary journey. For another, their journey to faith. For a third, it is their love for prayer. With another, it was the story of books read aloud to children and grandchildren that had drawn a family into the common narrative of the kingdom.

The other delight of course is having your attention called to books that you might want to read. The Robe is one of those classics I’ve never read. Death by Suburb sounds like it explores the realities we’ve lived with for the last 25 years in suburban Columbus. The Question of God is a book I own but haven’t read that is going to get moved onto the TBR pile.

This is one of the simplest things to organize. You just invite a group of friends to lunch (or brownies, as we did last January, described in my post “Books and Brownies“) and talk about the books that have meant the most to you or shaped your life. It might be that you could gather people around different themes (like “books I’d take on a vacation”, or books I hated as a kid and wouldn’t be without as an adult”).

(Books on this list are not endorsed by the Fellowship of Christian Faculty and Staff or The Ohio State University but simply by those recommending the books!)

What books have changed your life?

*Thanks go to Paul Post for typing up and posting the list!

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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It’s a hidden reality that is a grief some of my friends carry, and something some of my colleagues and I have been talking about this week. It is the challenge many of our friends who are believing graduate students and faculty face. It is that they are understood neither by their departments in the university nor the people in their churches. Universities often don’t get or actively challenge the “believing” part. And the church often doesn’t know what to do with the “faculty” or “graduate student” part.

The university’s response can be somewhat puzzling given the emphases on “tolerance” and “open inquiry” and “pursuit of truth”. Sadly, there is often an intolerant edge to tolerance, an a priori decision to rule out certain beliefs from discussion, and a reluctance to admit the possibility that if some things are true, others may not be.

While I could do a blog just on this (and may at some point) I want to focus on faculty in the church. Often the sense faculty get in the church is that the university is “the enemy”, and therefore they are a bit suspect. Sometimes the rigorous process of questioning that goes on in every academic discipline arouses suspicion that secretly they are at work undermining the faith of students. Sometimes faculty are thought of as simply these really smart people who do things that are incomprehensible to the average parishioner. Then there are the times that faculty hear discussions of science or technology drawn more from talk radio programs than serious research that they know are based on erroneous notions. This is most difficult when they hear these things from the pulpit.

On this matter of questioning, questioning is at the heart of academic work. The posing of questions is seen not as a means to undermine belief but to pursue greater understanding. On the incomprehensibility of academic work, there is an element of truth in that as you read some academic papers. The truth is that none of us has the technical knowledge to understand everything in the research world. But I’ve been amazed that many of these people are the kind of good teachers who can take complex things and explain them on a level where I can get at least a basic idea of their work if I’m willing to devote the attention. And how interesting it could be if pastors and others consulted with faculty who have expertise in certain areas when those areas arise in sermons, classes, or board discussions.

One of the things to be considered is that believing faculty and graduate students are part of the body of Christ.  When the faculty and grad student part of the body is hurting, it affects the rest of the body. And when the gifts of the faculty part of the body are welcomed and received, including the gifts related to their academic calling, the rest of the body is immeasurably enriched.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges is growing in our understanding of what it means to say “all truth is God’s truth”. The difficulty is that we don’t always see how truths in the Bible and truths uncovered in research connect. It seems that part of the problem is how uncomfortable it is when the connections aren’t apparent. Our faculty and grad students can help because many often spend years or entire careers seeking to resolve research questions. In the church, we often seem uncomfortable if we can’t resolve a question in 45 minutes. Yet not all of life’s and the world’s big questions are that easily resolvable.

By the same token, when researchers see something that doesn’t immediately square with their understanding of the Bible, that doesn’t mean the Bible is messed up or wrong. I would propose that we say, “that’s an interesting question, but let’s not jump to conclusions but work on our understanding of how these things connect”

I’d love to hear your experiences of the intersection of church and academia. What’s been hard? And what’s been good?

 

 

The Question of Identity in Academic Life

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Identity can be a challenging and confusing thing for anyone to sort out, and certainly this is the case in the academic setting. And part of the challenge is that we may be identified and self-identify in various ways. There is our race or ethnicity, our socio-economic class, our country and even city of origin, our gender and sexual orientation, our political persuasion, our academic status in terms of both appointments and achievements. And for the follower of Christ, there is one’s identification with Christ.

Yesterday was the last day of our Midwest Faculty Conference (I had many wrap up duties yesterday and travel today and so am just getting around to posting). As on other days, it seemed that our morning Bible studies captured an important thread of the day’s discussion. We looked at Genesis 50:15-26. Jacob, the father of the patriarchs have died and the brothers wonder if the reconciliation between them and Joseph will survive their father’s death. Will Joseph use his power as an Egyptian leader to retaliate for the fact that they sold him into slavery? So they concoct a message from Jacob on his deathbed pleading for understanding and they offer themselves as slaves.

Joseph weeps and says he would never do such a thing as they fear and that he will use his power to look out for them. But why does he weep? I think it is because the brothers act seems to reflect that they see Joseph as an Egyptian first, rather than as their brother and a fellow son of Jacob — an Israelite. Subsequently Joseph makes the matter clear. While he lives out his life in Egypt in service to Pharoah, his burial instructions specify that his body be returned to the land promised to Abraham when his people returned to that land. For Joseph, his Israelite identity was paramount and it defined his loyalty to his family and even his burial place. Yet he negotiated another identity, as an Egyptian leader, married by Pharoah to the daughter of a priest of an Egyptian god.

And this is the challenge of the multiple ways in which we identify ourselves, or others identify us. All of them are important. All of them have shaped who we are, how we see the world and relate to it, what we value. We can no more shed these things than our own skin. And sometimes, these multiple identities clash, and what do we do then? We heard of instances during the conference of conflicts where a university leader might need to implement decisions contrary to their faith commitments. Sometimes it’s possible to negotiate and find a better way. And sometimes not, and what does one do then?

At least part of the answer comes from clarity about which identity is paramount and “arbitrates” among the others. Perhaps it is not always obvious, but it seems that for Christians, there can be no other “paramount” identity than one’s allegiance to Christ, and secondarily to his global people who are constituted of the whole mosaic of identities existing in human society.  Yet this does not mean our responses to conflicting identity commitments are simple and clearcut, or will be the same. How our commitment to Christ arbitrates with our other identity commitments might look different for different ones of us. The nuances of how a Christian faculty member might deal with academic dishonesty might differ depending on whether s/he (and the student for that matter) comes from a shame or a guilt oriented culture, for example. Yet the exercise of justice, truth, and grace in the context of university policy will be a common thread in each of these situations, one would hope.

What do you think of this idea of paramount identity as key to negotiating our multiple identities and the conflicts these sometimes place us in? How have you experienced these challenges and how have you responded?

The Power of Sacrifice

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At our Midwest Faculty Conference today we had compelling presentations today about what it means to allow our love for God to shape STEM education and the questions we ask and the research projects we pursue.

What was most striking to me however was our small group study in Genesis 44. Joseph’s eleven brothers return to Egypt seeking grain, this time with Benjamin in tow. Joseph has his cup planted in Benjamin’s sack, then has him arrested for the theft. He offers to release the eleven brothers. The climax of the passage, and perhaps Genesis, is when Judah offers himself to be enslaved in Benjamin’s place. Genesis has been one long family conflict: Cain and Abel, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. We talked about how this was the first time someone sacrificed himself in Genesis. And we talked about the family reconciliation this made possible. That is the power of sacrifice.

The academic world is one of looking out for oneself, of promoting oneself, and self-protection. Sacrifice is rare, and yet this passage posed for us the question of how many times might sacrifice be the thing that heals broken and dysfunctional units or departments.

We concluded with observing that it is from Judah that Israel’s kingly line came–and the ultimate servant king Jesus. Judah’s sacrifice made possible things bigger than he ever knew in his lifetime. Might that not be the case in our day as well?

The Line Between Prudence and Courage

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I am participating this week in a conference on higher education and the role of Christians in exercising a redemptive influence in the academic world. A message this morning told the story of a pre-tenured professor who was respectful of others but forthright in sharing how his faith informed his academic work in public presentations. As anyone who is familiar with the academic world knows, this can be risky business. Tenure depends not only on objective things like publications, funding, service, and teaching, but also on what your colleagues think of you. And no matter how good the former, if the latter is a problem, a way often can be found to deny the candidate tenure.

Truth is, this poses a serious question for any person of faith. For such people, one’s beliefs are not confined to a small segment of life but inform how one thinks about all of life. And yet increasingly, people of faith are asked to keep those beliefs to themselves and not allow it to inform their ethics or their scholarship in the academic workplace, except where that conforms to academic orthodoxy.

Admittedly, there are times for prudence. Not every outrageous remark requires an answer. Not all battles are worth fighting. There are some sleeping dogs it is best to let lie. And there is the issue of recognizing that the university is supposed to be a place where no religious view is privileged. Hopefully what that means is that we can have respectful and civil conversations about differences. It does not mean we get to enforce our faith informed view on any issue unless we can persuade others that it really makes the most sense.

But when is courage called for? That is the harder question because courageous acts always require risk, and prudence often suggests avoiding risk. It seems that one instance is where the “prudent” act would be one that deceives others about oneself and denies the truth of what one believes, perhaps including the God one believes in. Courage seems in many cases to involve simply honesty when the alternative is evasion, deception, or denial.

Courage may also be called for when the welfare of others is endangered and trouble can be avoided by avoiding speaking up. I’m reminded of a faculty member who spoke up for a Christian student group whose status on campus was called into question simply because they required their leaders to be Christian. This person, who was highly respected, was not directly connected to the group and did not need to do so, yet was convinced that the university was wrongly using its power and put his own reputation (and power) on the line to make that point.

Those are a few of my reflections. I’d be curious what others think about this issue of where the line between prudence and courage is drawn?

The ‘End’ of the University

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This morning I’m writing from The Ohio State University where I will be participating in an online symposium on the theme of “The ‘End’ of the University.” We will be interacting with Dr. Santa J Ono, President of the University of Cincinnati who will be doing two presentations.

end-ono1

Why the dire sounding title you may ask? One reason is that this is a season of great change in the world of higher education. Online courses, some available for free, cost pressures, shrinking research funding, rapidly advancing institutions in many other countries, an emphasis of technology fields over the more traditional humanities are some of the reasons some are speaking so bleakly about this world. In many fields, far more graduate students are working toward Ph.Ds than the job markets can accommodate. Many times 300 candidates will apply for a single position. Many Ph.Ds are consigned to cobbling together a collection of adjunct positions or one year contracts and in many cases their annual earnings qualify them for some form of federal assistance.

But the title also plays on the word ‘end’, which can also speak of the purpose, the telos of university education. Why higher education? Is it just about getting the credentials for a good job? Is it just to provide post-adolescents a four year party experience before they enter the “real” world of work? Or is it to “educate” someone in the sense of introducing a person to the ideas that have got us to this place?

One of the reasons we put this together was to explore the contribution that people of faith can make to shaping the character of the university. What does the love of God have to do with the love of learning and fostering a spirit of inquiry? How does our understanding of the nature of human beings influence our thinking about how they learn and grow and change, ad even what is most important to learn? What are the principles that govern our uses of technology–is it simply that we will do what we can do? And this work thing–are we educating people just so they can build the economy of our state, which seems to treat them as cogs in a machine? Or is their something about the nature of human beings that is addressed through the opportunity for meaningful work?

These are just some of the kinds of questions that we might be exploring. Not my usual way of spending a Saturday morning but hopefully one that will advance an important conversation!