POSTS
TheArchive.
A chronological record of essays, thinking tools, and interventions.
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The Christian student and academic’s full body workout
I started (another) physical workout regime recently, and in order to drum up some enthusiasm for the task I did some lightweight web-based research on how to train and what it takes to keep going for the long term. One recalcitrant fact I kept butting up against is that it is little use to work
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A Pauline model for engaging with our academic disciplines
Somewhere in the Preaching Christ in a Postmodern World series of talks (available on iTunesU), Tim Keller offers a brilliant fourfold schema that can help Christian academics to engage with our disciplines in a God-honouring and constructive way. Keller unfolds the schema as a way of understanding and engaging with culture in general, but I have found it
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Why do I study something I don’t believe is true?
When it comes to what I research, one of the first challenges for me is to think through the following question: “Why do you study something you don’t believe is true?” These are my responses, in brief: 1. Saying ‘it is such a godless area, why study that?’ is like saying ‘Saudi Arabia is such
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Augustine on Christians reading pagan books
The notion that “faith” and “learning” need to be “integrated” is a slippery proposition. Sometimes it is embraced unthinkingly; sometimes it is dismissed precipitously. One assumption sometimes latent in the claim that we need to integrate Christ and academia is that there is an unbridgeable gulf between “Christian” and “non-Christian” thought. However, there is a
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Why Christians should make the best cultural critics (but often don’t)
I remember hearing a comment some years ago now from Tim Keller that gave me great encouragement in my studies at the time (it’s so long ago I can’t remember where it came from now). Keller, if I remember correctly, began with the somewhat provocative statement that Christians ought to be the best of all
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What does a “Christian approach” to my academic discipline even mean?
What does a “Christian approach” to my discipline even mean? Do I need to mention Jesus in the papers I write? Is it OK just to allude to something Christian in the acknowledgements? Should I quote the bible? What will happen if I do? I found myself asking questions like these pretty early on in
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Temptations of the academic life (2): combs and mirrors
When the Conquistadors sailed for the New World they brought along chests of mirrors and combs to dazzle the indigenous peoples and to give away in exchange for their land and their bodies in slavery. In my experience, the academic system can operate in a similar way. It is great at flattering us, preening our
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Temptations of the academic life (1): Making a name for myself
When God descends to the lofty tower of Babel (note the irony) in Genesis 11 to pronounce judgment on it, what is he judging? Certainly the people’s direct disobedience to his command to scatter over the face of the earth. Most probably the great evil that could be caused by a human race united in its
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The prayer life of an academic
How should we pray about our academic work? One tool I have found helpful (though I have used it far less often than I ought) is to pray into each area of the contacts-context-content schema I described in a previous post. Here is one prayer I wrote, related to the ‘context’ of my work. It’s
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Nicholas Wolterstorff video on transforming your discipline: Be patient and don’t jump on bandwagons
Speaking at the Centre for Christian Thought (CCT) conference at Biola University in 2012, Nicholas Wolterstorff touched on a point that many young Christian academics worry about, and that caused me a lot of anxiety in the early days. His talk was entitled ‘Fides quaerens intellectum’, faith seeking understanding, and among other topics he answered
