The Emerging Scholars Blog

Your Mind Matters

John Stott wraps up Your Mind Matters with “Acting on Our Knowledge.”  He begins by pointing out that we avoid the swing from anti-intellectualism to hyper-intellectualism, by remembering “just one thing:  God never intends knowledge to be an end in itself but always to be means to some other end.”

As a corollary to the mind and biblical knowledge being essential to the six spheres of Christian living, see Your Mind Matters 3: The Mind in Christian Life, Stott highlights the truth that:

“the acquisition of biblical knowledge must lead into these things [i.e., the six spheres] and enrich our experience of them.  Knowledge carries with it the solemn responsibility to act on the knowledge we have, to translate our knowledge into appropriate behavior.”

As a result, we find knowledge leading to worship, faith, holiness, and love.

Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service.  If we do not use the mind which God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riches of God’s grace.  … What we need is not less knowledge but more knowledge, so long as we act upon it. …

How have you found knowledge leading to worship, faith, holiness, and/or love?  Do you have particular illustrations in your own life and/or those of other followers of Christ (present or past) to share with the ESN community?

To inspire you, below’s a quote from A Priest Serving in Nature’s Temple: Robert Boyle’s Career Blended Faith, Doubt, and the Use of Science to Heal Disease and Fight Atheism.

Robert Boyle (1627-91)

As he [Robert Boyle, 1627-91] stated in A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things, he desired “that my Reader should not barely observe the Wisdom of God, but be in some measure Affectively Convinc’d of it.” There was no better way, in Boyle’s opinion, to “give us so great a wonder and veneration for it,” than “by Knowing and Considering the Admirable Contrivance of the Particular Productions of that Immense Wisdom,” by which he mainly meant the exquisitely fashioned parts of animals both great and small. Thereby, Boyle believed, “Men may be brought, upon the same account, both to acknowledge God, to admire Him, and to thank Him.” A pious and humble man, Boyle always sought to cultivate the same attitude in others. — Ted Davis Christian History 21(4) (November 2002): 28-31.

Note:  For more visit the Robert Boyle Project and read Davis’ longer article Robert Boyle’s Religious Life, Attitudes, and Vocation Science & Christian Belief 19.2 (2007): 117-38.  If you’re interested in my notes from Davis’ 6/29/2009 lecture on Robert Boyle’s Religious Life, Attitudes, and Vocation, drop me an email.

As you take a break to enjoy the summer weather, review these pieces and share your responses. …

1.  Andy Crouch: Christians, culture and power (Faith & Leadership, Duke University, 8:31 on-line video):  Andy’s back with more!  Do you agree with him that

Christians don’t like to talk about power. But cultural power — the ability to create — is something all people are meant to have.

Should we (or do you) start each day with such a vision? How well are you able to embrace and articulate a distinction between power to coerce (e.g., political) versus power to inspire (e.g., cultural power for the redemption of creation)?

2. Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data (George Johnson, NY Times, 6/22/09).  Check out

[t]he Vatican Observatory Research Group [which] does workmanlike astronomy that fights the perception that science and Catholicism necessarily conflict.

Galileo Before the Holy Office

Anyone have reflections on Galileo or The Two Books (i.e., the Book of Nature and the Scripture)?  On Monday, I had the opportunity to hear Ted Davis, Messiah College’s Historian of Science, lecture on The Galileo Affair: What Really Happened. He had just returned from The Legacy of Galileo Symposium and had upgraded his presentation, below’s an excerpt.

No story in all of the history of science is more famous than that of Galileo, who was tried by the Roman Inquisition after he had written a book advocating the new astronomy of Copernicus.  But the real facts of his story are much less well known.  …  The ideas being debated involved science and religion, but this is not an example of the “warfare” of science and religion.  Galileo saw himself as a faithful Catholic; the church never opposed any proven fact; and the real debate was between different Christian views on how to interpret the Bible. — Ted Davis, Messiah College, History of Science.  6/25/2009.  Part of the the Central Pennsylvania Forum for Religion and Science summer lecture series.

3.  When to Be Naïve: It’s not a virtue just for children (Christianity Today Magazine, 6/12/2009):  Edith M. Humphrey, William F. Orr Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, has a good word to share, wish the article was slightly longer.  Note:  If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Edith’s Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit Meets the Human Spirit (Eerdmans, 2005).

We must therefore consider the dynamic of the Christian story rather than merely static principles. God alone, who lives from eternity to eternity, has the wherewithal to be absolutely simple and omnisciently wise at the same time; human beings, on the other hand, must take things in stages, for they are indeed players in the drama of God.”

As always, if you’d like to contribute to next week’s Review, add your link(s) in the comments, or send them to Tom or Mike directly.

We continue our ESN Book Club discussion of John Stott’s Your Mind Matters with chapter 3, “The Mind in Christian Life.” Stott “examines six spheres of Christian living, each of which is impossible without the proper use of the mind,” namely:

• Christian worship
• Christian faith
• Christian holiness
• Christian guidance
• Christian evangelism
• Christian ministry

We could discuss all of these if we had time, but two items on this list which particularly struck me were holiness and guidance. Read the rest of this entry »

From Tom

Adam Smith: What’s Next for Google Book Search? (Chronicle of Higher Education, 06/12/09):  Do you use Google Books to take a preview and/or search materials?  Is your institution partnering with Google Book Search?  Does Smith address your concerns regarding access, fair use, and privacy?  What are your thoughts on orphan works?  How do you define orphan works?

Google has scanned millions of books and made snippets available online through its ambitious Book Search program. The project has taken heat from authors and publishers, but Adam Smith, Google’s director of product management, says it’s a good thing for academe. (Audio interview, 9:36)

[Mike notes: there are at least two groups not happy with Google's digital books program: the Department of Justice and Amazon.com.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.]

China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession (NY Times, 06/13/09):  Who is familiar with China’s gao kao, i.e., high test?  Would a boost of similar seriousness about education be helpful in the United States or would it increase competitive commercialization of higher education?  How does one encourage the pursuit and wise application of knowledge through vocation in the wider society?

The Chinese test is in some ways like the American SAT, except that it lasts more than twice as long. The nine-hour test is offered just once a year and is the sole determinant for admission to virtually all Chinese colleges and universities. About three in five students make the cut.

Families pull out all the stops to optimize their children’s scores.

From Mike

Mentoring: Call for Papers – The University of New Mexico Mentoring Institute is seeking proposals about effective mentoring for their Second Mentoring Conference. I went last year and was favorably impressed. While the institute and conference are hosted by a public university, there were a number of Christian academics involved last year (from both secular and Christian universities), and issues related to religious faith were openly discussed. For example, several of the mentoring presentations addressed spiritual components of mentoring, two of the plenary speakers (Brad Johnson and Lewis Schlosser) spoke briefly about their different religious views in the context of their mentor-mentee and collegial relationship, and several speakers spoke to questions about how to relate to a mentor or protege with very different religious, political, or personal beliefs from your own. Deadline for submissions is July 31.

Languages on Life Support – From the Chronicle, a survey of the state of dying languages in the world today, and the efforts (or lack thereof) of academic linguists to preserve them.

Of the estimated 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world — about one-half of the number used 10,000 years ago — at least one-half will almost certainly be dead by midcentury, while another 40 percent will most likely become too diminished to survive much beyond 2100. The causes are largely agreed upon: colonization and other demographic shifts, government neglect or outright suppression of regional and indigenous languages, the influence of mass media.

The article explores the question of whether Noam Chomsky’s theory of a “universal grammar” eliminates the urgency to record details of specific languages.  Chomsky himself says no, but others aren’t so sure.  Personally, I was struck by the complete absence of any mention whatsoever of groups like Wycliffe Bible Translators or SIL, which are doing serious work around the world preserving languages.   (For more on linguistics, see my previous post about Dan Everett.)

Tomorrow, I’m leaving for our Midwest Faculty Conference, featuring John Sommerville as our plenary speaker. (Check out my quick review of his book, The Decline of the Secular University, as well as his latest essay in the Chronicle, “Universities Are Corporatized Because They Are Secularized”.) Since starting these summer faculty conferences a few years ago, we’ve tried to make them times of refreshment – for both faculty and their entire family. Our planning team even coined a new word for these events – confamication:

This event encompasses much more than the word conference can possibly contain, so a new word has been added to the lexicon. “Confamication” captures the fact of it being a stimulating conference, a restful vacation, which can both include and be a delight to the whole family. And it is a welcoming place for singles, couples and children as well.

Unfortunately, not all of academia shares this attitude that the “good life” includes rest, spiritual refreshment, and time with families and children. Lisa Belkin, who writes the Motherlode blog for the New York Times, recently published a heart-breaking letter from a young graduate student who, faced with an unexpected, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, has decided to have an abortion so that she can complete her degree. The decision was far from easy – you can hear her agony in her letter to Belkin. Explicit and implicit pressures from her graduate program were a major factor in her decision. Here’s how she described her sitaution: Read the rest of this entry »

Your Mind Matters

In the section entitled thinking God’s thoughts, John Stott argues Psalm 19:1-4 and Romans 1:18-21

refer to God’s self-revelation through the created order.  Although it is a proclamation without speech, a voice without words, yet as a result of it all men to some degree “know God.”  This assumed ability of man to read what God has written in the universe is extremely important.  All scientific research depends upon it, upon a correspondence between the character of what is being investigated and the mind of the investigator.  This correspondence is rationality. Man is able to comprehend the processes of nature.  They are not mysterious.  They are logically explicable in terms of cause and effect.  Christians believe that this common rationality between man’s mind and observable phenomena is due to the Creator who has expressed his mind in both.  As a result, in the astronomer Kepler’s famous words, men can “think God’s thoughts after him.” — Your Mind Matters, p.28

Do you agree?  Can human beings think God’s thoughts after him? Is this the basis of science and possibly even the use of the mind in general?  Is that how you approach decision making, research, teaching, and writing?

Let’s begin chatting. … In a few days I’ll throw out a couple more questions from the Chapter 2.

From Tom

Five Ways to Fix America’s Schools (Harold O. Levy, NY Times Op-Ed, 06/08/2009):  Any comments and/or recommendations?

The biggest improvement we can make in higher education is to produce more qualified applicants. Half of the freshmen at community colleges and a third of freshmen at four-year colleges matriculate with academic skills in at least one subject too weak to allow them to do college work. Unsurprisingly, the average college graduation rates even at four-year institutions are less than 60 percent. Read the rest of this entry »

A special thank-you to the Emerging Scholar from Johns Hopkins University who passed along notes from Is God Relevant in the Public Square? Living with our deepest differences in a world of exploding pluralism — Os Guinness (March 26, Veritas Forum).*  Anyone have testimonies regarding or reflections upon the creation, cultivation, encouragement, and/or maintenance of a “Civil” Public Square on their campus, in their discipline?

——————-

Os Guinness, an author and social critic, began by asking us to take a look at history. In the last century, someone has been killed every moment in the name of religion.  Yet — as we’ve discussed here before — if we look at those killed by secular regimes in this century, the number is greater by far than all those killed by religions in all of past history combined.

What lessons can we learn from this? Guinness proposed three.

Read the rest of this entry »

Your Mind Matters

This week starts our first ESN Book Club. Over the next four weeks, Tom and I will be leading our discussion of John Stott’s classic, Your Mind Matters. If you don’t have a copy of the book, our introduction to the ESN Book Club includes several options where you can buy it. This week, we’ll be discussing the Mark Noll’s foreword and chapter one, “Mindless Christianity,” which are available as free PDF downloads from InterVarsity Press.

Here’s how this will work: Tom and I will alternate with a post about the book each Tuesday (Thursday and Friday will be other topics as usual). The key is that we want to discuss the book, not simply review it, so we’ll highlight key passages and raise questions about the chapter, with your thoughts eagerly desired. I’m the first to admit that it won’t be as fun as a face-to-face book club, but if you want to take your laptop to your local coffee shop and sit in a comfy chair while commenting, that might help recreate the effect.

[BTW, if you are hosting a physical ESN book discussion, let us know and we'll be happy to spread the word.]

After the jump: Mark Noll’s Foreword and John Stott’s chapter on “mindless Christianity.” Read the rest of this entry »

In this week’s Week in Review, new graduates dealing with the recession, some notable reviews of N.T. Wright’s new book, Justification, a new website for Christian lawyers, some additional coverage of A. N. Wilson’s conversion, and more! If you’d like to contribute to next week’s Review, add your link(s) in the comments, or send them to Tom or Mike directly.

Reminder: We start our ESN Book Club on Your Mind Matters next Tuesday, June 9. We’ll start with the forewords and Chapter 1. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, you can download next week’s selection directly from IVP’s website as a PDF. Read the rest of this entry »