Discipleship – Page 3 – Education is Discipleship

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.

August 2, 2019

Thursday Reading Log

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostovesky: I’d never read it before, and our SWU students wanted to tackle it this summer. I’m glad I have an excuse to read it. I’ve read about 200 pages thus far, and it’s very good. The murder is horrifying (as it should be), and I’m already starting to see how Dostoevsky is going to handle its brutal aftermath: through periodic peaks and terrifying depths in Raskolnikov’s emotions and mind.

The Rhetoric of Transformation – Adam Ellwanger: This is a friend’s forthcoming book, and it was a gripping read, high praise for a book destined for an academic press. Ellwanger traces the classical rhetorical term metanoia from a way to describe a linguistic apology to a term that described personal transformation in Christianity to a means to assert the reclaiming of one’s original identity in contemporary secular culture. The final section, where Ellwanger explains what the ramifications of this turn might be for how we think about composition studies, is an absolute haymaker.

Why Liberalism Failed – Patrick Deneen: I continued reading this book, and I found it a nice companion piece to Ellwanger’s book. The biggest attraction and flaw of liberalism, according to Deneen, is the way it privileges the autonomous individual. There are weaknesses in Deneen’s argument. I’m not ready to cede that liberalism, root and branch, is the problem. But Deneen’s arguments force me to come up with compelling arguments for things I considered givens re: my political beliefs.

The Case of the Daring Decoy – Erle Stanley Gardner: The latest novel I’m reading for my Perry Mason podcast, this book is notable for giving Paul Drake a potential love interest, a first for any novel I’ve read. The novels never feature a confession (this one is no different), but Perry’s courtroom means of confirming the murderer’s guilt while in court is quite nice. The television adaptation of this episode took most of its beats from the novel.

July 31, 2019April 19, 2020

How Do You Think Well?

Jacobs, Alan. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, 2017.

Alan Jacobs, an English professor in the Baylor University Honors Program, provides hope for those who wish to think more soundly in these contentious times through this short, lively manual on the way we make decisions. Jacobs engages with the experts on the topic (chiefly Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt), pulls specific examples out of the recent past to illustrate his points, and even provides a compelling checklist for thinking well. As Jacobs contends, part of good thinking is merely diagnostic: knowing that you have a thinking conundrum. If you can internalize a few more of Jacobs’s recommended best practices, you’ll be glad you read the book.

July 30, 2019

Why I Believe in God Part 1: Rhetorical Analysis

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be analyzing the rhetoric of Cornelius Van Til’s “Why I Believe in God.”

In the first part of his apology for believing in God, Cornelius Van Til argues that believing in God is necessary because without God we couldn’t understand anything else. He begins his apology for believing in God by bringing up eminent scientists and philosophers who are have recently addressed belief. Jeans and Eddington allow for the possibility of religious experience, and Joad says that evil’s reality forces him to consider the possibility of God’s existence. Van Til wonders if the reader has pondered what happens after death. After all, even Socrates—the wisest philosopher—was uncertain of what would happen after he died. Is there a judgment or might there be a God? How does one know for sure. Asking such questions is a sure sign of intelligence and indicates a desire for you to know why it is you believe what you believe. You want to know what’s real, and asking about God is one way of doing that. Van Til indicates that his belief in God started when he was young and that he knows such an admission will taint his case in the reader’s eyes. He doesn’t agree, however. He will discuss the arguments he’s heard against God since he’s been an adult and why he’s even more positive now that God exists. Both the arguments he makes and the arguments he anticipates his readers will make are premised on God. He compares this state of affair to arguing about air while breathing it the entire time or trying to blow up a gun stand while using the gun stand as a foundation for your guns. Unless the thing you’re attacking existed in the first place, you couldn’t make your attack on its existence.

July 30, 2019

Verse of the Week: Psalm 139:23

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
Psalm 139:23

I am anxious and am worried about many things. I am worried about my adequacy as a teacher and scholar. I am worried about my adequacy as a husband and father. I am worried about my adequacy as a child of God.

Yet the solution proposed in the Psalm is not intense self-analysis or reflection. Instead, the Psalmist asks God to search him and, through testing, to know my anxious thoughts.

This, indeed, is a radical kind of pedagogy!

If I am the student, the one who endures the test, then how am I learning if it is God who knows my heart and my anxious thoughts? Wouldn’t it best for me to know them so as to, you know, give them over to God?

The root of a God-centered education might very well be letting go of that need to know our own hearts first.

This week when I feel anxiety, I want my first impulse to be prayer: that God would know my heart and my anxious thoughts and that the Holy Spirit would intercede for me in my ignorance. This semester when I feel anxiety, I want my first impulse to be prayer too so that this semester when my students are afflicted by anxieties, I can with confidence encourage them to turn to God and pray this Psalm as well.