Discipleship – Page 3 – Education is Discipleship

August 17, 2019April 17, 2020

Three Books I’ve Been Reading

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell—Susana Clarke: I’ve fallen headlong into this 1,000 page neo-Victorian novel with its faeries and magic, delightfully drawn human characters, and flat-out world-beating narrator. I’m not sure how I’m going to finish it as the semester ramps up, but I’m going to find a way. The two title characters have just met (it took nearly 300 pages!), and their differences in proximity to one another are intensifying the novel’s already abundant pleasures. One surprising feature? The copious footnotes that delineate the 19^th century world of faerie/magic scholarship.

The Case of the Screaming Woman—Erle Stanley Gardner: This novel produced my favorite episode of the television series. I’ve been looking forward to reading the novel, and I was delighted to find that Gardner was responsible for my two favorite parts of the show: a tête-à-tête between Perry and a shyster defense attorney and Della having to testify while Perry fends off the DA’s questions with a barrage of objections. Everything from the murder victim to the defendant and murderer were different, but those two scenes were worth the price of admission.

Crime and Punishment—Fyodor Dostoevsky: I am now through four parts of Dostoevsky’s book and am now thoroughly enjoying it. The first two sections started slowly and then gained in interest as they went in. Parts three and four have been fascinating from start to finish. Svidrigailov is a great villain, Dunia and Sonia are strong female characters, and Porfiry? Well, that guy is Columbo avant la lettre. One of the things that I was particularly intrigued by was Sonia reading the story of Lazarus to Raskolnikov. It’s such a moving scene. We rarely see characters who are not ministers read scripture, much less do so in community. This scene is amazing.

August 17, 2019May 29, 2020

Why Team Success Is Hard To Sustain

Halberstam, David. The Breaks of the Game, 1981.

A Harvard-trained journalist who made his bones chronicling the Vietnam War, David Halberstam was the first high-profile journalist to spill ample amounts of ink on the NBA. His classic The Breaks of the Game is the result of a year, the 1979-1980 season, spent with the Portland Trail Blazers who had only a few years earlier been league champions. Through the story of one team, Halberstam was able to offer a view of the entire professional sport at what, nearly 30 years later, was a crucial moment in that sport’s history. Halberstam’s book profiles too many players, coaches, and executives to have one real protagonist. In fact, the man on the cover of the current edition of the book, Bill Walton, isn’t even a Blazer during the season Halberstam covered. Yet Walton’s legacy, especially his contribution to the Blazers’s championship in 1976-1977 championship, hangs over the entire book like a thick fog. In addition to Walton, Halberstam spends considerable time covering, among others, the Blazer players Kermit Washington, Maurice Lucas, Larry Steele, and Billy Ray Bates; coaches Jack Ramsey and Lenny Wilkins; as well as Blazers GM Stu Inman and owner Larry Weinberg. In Halberstam’s hands, the season encapsulates the conflict of sports and business, the tensions of individual and team success, and the turn-on-a-dime nature of professional heartbreak or jubilation. This is the best sports book I’ve ever read.

August 13, 2019April 17, 2020

Got Questions? God’s Got Answers: Proverbs 2:3-5

Indeed, if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.
Proverbs 2:3-5

This week, my commitment is to seek God’s face for understanding as I prepare for the new semester. If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then this proverb describes the way to understand that fear properly. This quest requires that I ask and search with passion, that I acknowledge with my words and deeds how vital such knowledge is. The process matters, but it’s the results that matter: finding the silver and hidden treasure of God’s knowledge. I want that for myself, but I want it even more for my students.

August 9, 2019April 17, 2020

Two Books I’m Reading This Week

The Breaks of the Game—David Halberstam: The game is basketball, and the breaks are the hundreds of tiny things that go into making someone’s professional career in the National Basketball Association a success or failure. By the time Halberstam drops the titular phrase, you’ve felt the highs and lows of the sport and the men who play it. The man who uses the line is Larry Steele, a veteran of the Portland Trail Blazers whose name and history in the league are probably only recalled by Blazer trivia fanatics. But here was a man who played for nine seasons with one team, sacrificed his body for his team, won a single championship, and then was placed on waivers when his knees gave out. Steele played for Adolph Rupp at the University of Kentucky and had joined the Blazers in their first year of existence. His tale is one of small heartbreak and a modicum of achievement, yet when you hear his story, it feels like something more. He is one small character in Halberstam’s amazingly detailed journey through one NBA season with Steele’s team, the Trail Blazers. Along the way, Halberstam provides insight into the intersection of commerce and sports, the history of professional basketball, the racial dynamics in the league and the nation, and the most interesting players on every other team because this was the rookie year of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. This was a great read, and once I started it I couldn’t stop reading it.

The Secrets Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert—Rosaria Champagne Butterfield: I was drawn to Butterfield’s story because she was a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University when she converted. She is no longer a professor. Instead, she teaches her adopted children while her husband serves as minister for a Reformed church. In these polarized times, a conversion narrative where someone changes his or her mind is worth reading. When that someone happens to be in my profession and the change means going from a critic and disparager of Christianity to a proponent of rigorously conservative and deeply theological Christianity, this story is a mind-blower indeed. I have yet to mention the reason I had this book recommended to me; Butterfield was a militant feminist and lesbian prior to her conversion. This makes her story a particularly loaded one for debates about same sex desire. Butterfield is adamant that the holy spirit changed her and that is she is not who she was. These parts of the book are powerful and worth reading. What makes the book remarkable is that Butterfield has included so many other ruminations on life as a believer. The most memorable were her comments on the pains, along with the joys, of conversion so as to let Christians who pray for their friends to come to Christ might know the serious consequences of what they’re asking for; her detailed description of the regulative principle of worship as a way of demonstrating how she now engages with scripture as part of a larger community; and her chapter on adoption which is raw and honest and God-honoring.

August 9, 2019April 17, 2020

A Key Moment in the History of Data Visualization

**Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, 2006.**

A popular science writer and former distinguished writer in residence in NYU’s school of journalism, Steven Johnson has produced a page-turner that tells the tale of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak. Johnson’s book has four protagonists: the city of London, the bacterium that caused the outbreak, and two men—the doctor John Snow and clergyman Henry Whitehead. In Johnson’s hands, this story encapsulates science’s victory over superstition and marks the point at which it became realistic to believe urban centers like London could survive and thrive, not just in spite of, but perhaps because of their size. If you can manage to get past Johnson’s occasional religious biases, you’ll get something out of the book.

August 7, 2019

Why I Believe in God Part 2: Rhetorical Analysis

Last week I began analyzing the Cornelius Van Til tract “Why I Believe in God.” Each Tuesday, I will continue that series until I complete it.

In the second section of his presentation “Why I Believe in God,” Van Til addresses the cultural assumption that our birth is an accident. He addresses the listener’s upbringing in Washington DC, a city that represents freedom, opportunity, and power. In contrast, Van Til’s own upbringing was humble. He was born on a farm in Holland claims to have worn wooden shoes. His point is that neither of them was really born in an extremely foreign place but in nations that have a religious past that is distinctly Christian. Van Til concludes that their discussion about God should thus concern the Christian God. Van Til admits that he and his listener differ in their belief, but he wants to make clear that he’s not arguing for the existence of a generic deity. The God he’s talking about is the Christian God. Next, Van Til addresses how he will make his argument. He admits he cannot produce God to walk alongside them as though God were just another human being. This is fine on Van Til’s part since the invisibility and omnipresence of God are not things that would allow such proof. Van Til is going to show: it’s reasonable to believe in God. Van Til registers the listener’s response. Van Til understands this will require a serious conversation because the consequences of the listener changing his mind about God would include the way the listener thinks about himself. In fact, Van Til gives the listener a chance to leave but appeals to the listener’s intelligence: why not hear the other side?

Van Til’s argument continues to be effective, chiefly in using his own story to limit the parameters of the case he’s making to the unbeliever. He will argue for the Christian God, not any God, and he believes he case he’s presenting is reasonable in accordance with who the Christian God is. Any proof of the Christian God’s existence is not subject to the reasonableness of the listener, but to the qualities God has revealed about himself in his word. The point is sealed by the fact that Van Til gets the listener to agree to listen based on the listener’s own reasonableness. That is, Van Til has not allowed the listener to determine what a reasonable demonstration of God’s existence is, but he has gotten the opportunity to share about the Christian God by appealing to the listener’s general reasonableness as demonstrated by the willingness to listen to someone you disagree with.

Also effective is the key figure of speech Van Til uses which shows that he understands the emotional stakes of this discussion. He says the listener looks “like a man about to undergo a major operation.” The comparison is apt. As a believer in God, Van Til feels something is wrong with the listener who does not believe in God, and Van Til wants that dire condition in the listener to be fixed. But surgery is serious. It requires preparation and serious recovery time. It’s not like reading the newspaper. This gives Van Til the opportunity to expound on a truth about believing in God: it has consequences. It changes the way you see yourself, and Van Til knows that this might hurt, just as surgery might leave you sore. Van Til also knows that without the surgery, the patient will likely die, so after gaining the listener’s consent, he continues his case.

August 5, 2019

Verse of the Week: II Timothy 3:7

“…always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”
II Timothy 3:7

In his list of the evil attributes of people in the last days, Paul includes this stinging indictment. It’s a poignant one for anyone involved in education.

Two things strike me.

First, it’s possible to learn and not have truth as that learning’s object. The learning is real. It just doesn’t go where it should.

Second, the destination does matter. It’s not just about the journey or process of learning. If I keep gathering knowledge but don’t care about how what I’ve learned connects to the truth, my learning is a distraction.

As the semester nears, I want my students to learn but I am desperate for them to know the truth of God’s love, grace, mercy, and justice. I pray that my own educational ventures will be focused on truth and that in living this out, I will be better able to teach my students to do this as well.

August 3, 2019

My Fear: Teaching Reflection

I have been meditating on Psalm 139 this week. Psalm 139 shows the poet astounded by the depth and accuracy of God’s knowledge of him. In moments of doubt, surrounded by wickedness, the speaker knows that God is there and know his righteousness.

Two things have stood out to me.

First, I must always remain cognizant of God’s knowledge first and my knowledge second. I am prone to start with my own quest and only after I’ve discovered something reach out to position it regarding God’s truth. This passage reminds me that my knowledge of myself and the world pales in comparison to God. It is an encouragement to rely on this truth and a provocation to pray for this knowledge to be revealed to me as I follow God.

Second, I realized that my obsession with my own knowledge is rooted in fear.

I am so invested in knowing—things, others, myself—that admitting when I’m wrong is hard.

But I am wrong. A lot.

I am fearful. I don’t want to admit that I’m wrong because it might compromise my authority. But there’s another fear I have, one I rarely admit to myself. I’m am at times afraid to declare the truth because of who I might offend.

I pray that this year God will give me the boldness to declare the truth even when I know it might offend and the humility to admit when I am wrong.