Archive for the ‘john sommerville’ tag
Is there a Christian intellectual presence on your campus?
One form of Christian presence on campus.
A few different strands of thought came together for me this morning in the form of a question. Let me throw out the question first, and then elaborate.
Is there a public Christian intellectual presence on your campus?
Here are the threads that came together for me. First, in our recent book discussion of John Stott’s Your Mind Matters, Stott describes a kind of intellectualism that is very public. For example, in chapter 3, he “examines six spheres of Christian living, each of which is impossible without the proper use of the mind”: worship, faith, holiness, guidance, evangelism, and ministry. These have internal and private aspects, but also external, public aspects. I’d be willing to bet that, on your campus, there are at least two or three of these which are very public indeed. Picture the sidewalk evangelists who roam through each year, or campus ministry student outreach events. On some campuses, worship or holiness might have similar public aspects.
Image credit: falonyates via Flickr.
Can New Symbols Change Academic Culture?
John Sommerville at the Midwest Faculty Conference
Two weeks ago, I was at InterVarsity’s Cedar Campus for our 2009 Midwest Faculty Conference. John Sommerville, professor emeritus of history at U. Florida and author of The Decline of the Secular University
The third of his four talks addressed a key question: How can Christians change our universities? We’ll be posting the complete talk in the near future, but I wanted to highlight one suggestion that Sommerville made, explicitly borrowing an idea from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: The only way to change culture is to create more of it.
Specfically, Sommerville thinks that Christian academics ought to be creating new symbols within their discipline and for the university as a whole. While he thinks that new concepts and new ideas are important and necessary, these are far more rare and, really, outside the realm of possibility for most of us. Symbols, however, are powerful conveyors of ideas that frame the thinking of both academics and the general public. Read the rest of this entry »
Week in Review – Summer Reflections on Education, the Outdoors, and the Mind
This week’s Week in Review includes possible ways to address the shortfall of America’s schools, to keep pace with textbook technology, to enjoy the outdoors through reading, 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.
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 »
The Decline of the Secular University
Decline of the Secular University
C. John Sommerville is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Florida. In 2006, Oxford University Press published a little book of his called The Decline of the Secular University
Sommerville summarizes his book as follows:
My thesis in what follows is, first, that the secular university is increasingly marginal to American society and, second, that this is a result of its secularism. In effect, I mean that questions that might be central to the university’s mission are too religious for it to deal with. (4)
In particular, he points to universities’ inability to shape public opinion on such issues as politics, science, and business, and the overall anti-intellectualism of American society.
