I think that’s an avenue in which Christian college ministries and professors can serve: helping students develop holistically and not just making the grade.

http://thedw.us/post/229962890/venn-diagram-of-the-day-a-few-weak-points

Too bad that at that time, I was straight out of undergrad and entirely too green and un-self-aware to know just what kind of relationship with my advisor I wanted, or needed. It’s one of the main reasons I wish I’d gone to work in industry for a couple of years before graduate school. Woulda coulda shoulda.

Compound on that the quarter life crisis that everyone my age (late 20’s) is having right now, when we realize we aren’t as happy as we thought we would be by now, and we can’t figure out why. Perhaps it’s because we didn’t know what we wanted out of life when we were in college anyway, or thought it would all work out as planned, and so never knew to ask ourselves the right questions.

I was challenged recently at a seminar at our university’s Center for Teaching & Learning about writing objectives for our courses that describe what we want our students to understand and be able to do at the end of a course. Teaching physics, this can be a difficult process, since our knee-jerk reaction is just to say, “They should be able to solve the problems.”

But really thinking through the learning objective process led me to further develop my conception of what I want the students to understand–regardless of how that understanding is manifested–and I find now that I have a lot more room for student creativity on term papers and lab exercises. And amazingly enough, they perform better on the more traditional problem-solving questions in such an environment.

This conversation is a sample of what can ‘come to the table,’ particularly at college desire to clarify how it has moved on from it’s religious heritage, such as what George Marsden researches/writes about in “The Soul of the American University” (Oxford University Press, 1994). BTW, who would have remembered F&M’s connection to the Reformed Church, later part of the United Church of Christ, which was “severed” when “the College became a secular institution” but “remained committed to ‘liberal learning’” in 1969 (see http://www.fandm.edu/x20902, accessed 10/21/2009, 1:30 pm)? Note the Provost’s emphasis on putting the religious heritage behind in order to be secular and her concern regarding Agassiz’s rejection of evolution.

Too much in the post to copy here, but here’s a pertinent section regarding how followers of Christ perceive/experience the environment of a liberal arts college such as F&M. Note: At the time, Michael Murray was a Philosophy Professor at F&M (http://www.fandm.edu/x11310?id=204, accessed 10/21/2009, 1:36 pm) now he is the John Templeton Foundation’s Vice President for Philosophy and Theology (http://www.templeton.org/about_us/who_we_are/leadership_team/michael_murray/, accessed 10/21/2009, 1:36 pm).

“In the conversation afterward several Christian students shared their feelings of being marginalized on campus because of their faith. Michael [Murray] affirmed that he has seen this in the lives of a number of students and in his own as a follower of Christ during his 18 years at F&M. A number of students present emphasized their desire for more science-religion conversation. One student expressed concern regarding the erasure of [campus] memory — although a classmate disagreed. And one student even challenged the Provost as to whether concerns as to the allusion to faith and not Agassiz’s racism was at the core of the removal.

As to concerns which those in the future might bring to our current scientific work, the following were suggested: scientism’s rejection of broader conversation regarding the origin of life, money directing scientific research, arrogance of science/technology (we need a dose of humility), atheism’s role in guiding science (it was confessed that we all bring a bias, but scientists propose a hypothesis with the ability to falsify as one follows the evidence where it leads . . . unlike religion).”

Note: More response coming in the post on Chapter 3.

I sometimes use physics and math analogies in theology. E.g., regarding the issue of “soul sleep” (are we consciously with God during the time between our death and the final resurrection) can we even talk about an absolute time? What if the person just before they died was put on a rocket ship that went near the speed of light and experienced almost no time passing before Christ returned? Some people roll their eyes but generally, in any group there are people who like to think about puzzles and tricky questions.