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The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a recent article (sorry - subscription required) called “So Much for the Information Age,” from a college professor lamenting his students’ deplorable grasp of current events and world history. This professor teaches journalism at one of our countries’ top universities, yet here is a sampling of what he found when he surveyed his students:

Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn’t pretty.

I don’t think this is all that surprising, and it probably says much more about our nation’s primary and secondary educational systems than it does about the university world. 

The professor goes on to express concern about our nation’s future, and about how we as a nation have failed our students, by considering them “educated” when they can’t discuss the front page of The New York Times.  

I hope that Christian students are taking a different approach to their studies, and educating themselves whether or not the system is.  After all, we worship a God who made the world, who loves the world, and who loves the people of the world so much that he sent his Son to die for the world.  That same God then calls us to emulate Him and be formed in the image of Christ.  

Since God loves our neighbors and the world they live in, so should we.  And the first step is to learn about the world in which we find ourselves. 

You can now register online for Following Christ 2008, including the first Emerging Scholars Network National Gathering.  Register online at the Following Christ website. 

Following Christ 2008 will be held in Chicago, from December 27 to 31.  Plenary speakers will include N. T. Wright, one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, and Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and outspoken Christian.  Other speakers will include Carmen Acevedo Butcher, MaryKate Morse, and Jeff Van Duzer.  Part of Following Christ will be devoted to discipline-specific tracks, devoted to understanding how following Christ affects our daily work in the arts, business, the humanities, healthcare, and more. 

The use of abortion to choose the gender of a child has long been a concern of the pro-life movement, especially in countries like China or India where cultural and legal norms make both gender selection and abortion more acceptable.  A new study is suggesting that some ethnic groups - specifically Chinese, Korean, and Indian - in the United States may also be using abortion to choose the gender of their children. William Saletan of Slate.com has a good writeup of the study and some implications. 

However, the conclusion of the article is a bit confusing, 

If you think of yourself as a techno-progressive—someone who believes, as Barack Obama does, that “maximizing the power of technology” will help fix everything from energy to theenvironment to health care—the increase in sex selection should give you pause. Technology can facilitate regression as easily as it facilitates progress.

OK - I’m good with that.  I thought that “technology=progress=unlimited good” went out with the Victorians, but that’s fine if people are just now waking up to reality.  The rest of that paragraph is a bit odd. 

But if you think of yourself as a pro-life conservative, the data should humble you, too. In the populations in which it has increased, sex selection isn’t a newfangled perversion. It’s a custom, and a patriarchal one at that. If the sex-selection story teaches us all to be a bit more skeptical of both tradition and technology, that’ll be real progress.

Eh?  Perhaps some pro-life conservatives base their position of “patriarchal custom,” but I’m not aware of custom or patriarchy or tradition - much less Chinese, Korean, or Indian tradition - being used as a foundation for pro-life arguments in the United States.  

This recent story - about a Vietnamese man who runs an orphanage for unwanted children next door to an abortion clinic in Vietnam - notes that he receives donations from “Christian and Buddhist organizations.” I have not encountered any Buddhist or Hindu approaches to abortion - either for or against - so I would be very interested in learning more about how non-Western religions regard abortion. 

At InterVarsity’s recent Graduate and Faculty Ministry staff conference, we honored Terry Morrison for his many years of ministry. Terry is currently Director Emeritus for Faculty Ministry, and served as IVCF’s second Faculty Ministry Director. Terry has a powerful ministry among Christian faculty around the country, and he played a small, but crucial, role in my own journey.

In college, I became an English major because I loved to read. Only after I responded to the call of Christ did I start to see that there were truths that could be understood through language, and began to desire to integrate my love for Christ with my love for literature. At the time, I thought that a PhD in English was the most direct route to this integration, and besides, I loved school and had very good grades and test scores, so a PhD made sense. I knew from personal experience, however, that English departments were not necessarily friendly to Christian faith, and explicit questions about, say, how Christ’s identity as the Word of God influences our understanding of human words were not exactly welcomed. I wrote a lot of poetry back then, and I was especially interested in the practice of language, and my relationship with Christ was a central theme in my poetry. I knew that I would have to be careful in my choice of graduate school, so that I would be free to explore this integration project.

Through a series of InterVarsity connections, I was put in touch with Terry Morrison. Robbie Castleman’s True Love in a World of False Hope had been very influential in my relationship with Elizabeth, and we had met Robbie at chapter camp in Florida. At the time, Robbie was working with graduate students in Florida, and she directed me to Terry, then the Director of Faculty Ministry. One of Terry’s gifts is countless relationships with Christian faculty around the country, and he immediately pointed me to three Christian English professors who he thought could help me.

I emailed all three, and put to them a question that, looking back, I think is a little odd: “Where I can I go to earn a PhD, where I can integrate my love for Christ with my love for literature?” The first emailed me back and said, “I have no idea, but don’t do what I did.” The second wrote back and said, “I have no idea, but perhaps Baylor.” The third wrote back: “I’m not sure there is such a place. I think you will be facing a long and lonely battle. You can, however, do what I did, and earn a theology degree first. That way, you will have the foundation you need to do the integrative work yourself.” I just happened to be reading Knowing God by J. I. Packer and Earth and Altar by Eugene Peterson at the time, and both men “just happened” to teach at a school I had never heard of, Regent College. And now you know the rest of the story.

Looking back, that series of conversations and connections - from Robbie, to Terry, to those three Christian professors (whose names, alas, I have forgotten) - was one of the key turning points in my walk with Christ and my understanding of my vocation. As I have joined ESN, I have spoken to many people about these conversations, and reflected on them frequently to understand why (I think) God has called me to ESN. I would be willing to wager that Terry was a central link in more conversations like these than he will ever know on this side of heaven.

And that’s why I praise God for Terry Morrison.