This book releases on March 1:
Alex Chediak. Preparing Your Teens for College: Faith, Friends, Finances, and Much More. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2014. 64-page sample PDF. 2-minute video trailer.
Chediak’s 2011 book is for teens. This one is for their parents. Both are helpful guides.
And WTS Books has a special sale on Chediak’s book starting today. [Read more…] about Preparing Your Teens for College
In a recent chapel message at Bethlehem College & Seminary, Jason Abell explains why administration is important.
Jason is BCS’s Vice President for Administration. I am so encouraged by this message and by the interaction I’ve had with Jason and others at BCS. (I’m eager to join the team in several months.)
I’ve witnessed some situations where the relationship between a school’s faculty and administration is unhealthy. Not good.
Jason closes with a provocative analogy that I hadn’t heard someone (let alone an administrator) apply to administration and faculty before:
administration : faculty :: shaft : tip of the spear
That is, [Read more…] about Administration : Faculty :: Shaft : Tip of the Spear
Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012. 143 pp. 1991. Repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003. 230 pp. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012. 318 pp. 13-page sample PDF. Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012. 121 pp. 23-page sample PDF.
My favorite essay in the Davis-Ryken volume is chapter 9: Alan Jacobs, “How to Read a Book” (pp. 123–31). Jacobs unpacks this famous sentence by Francis Bacon: [Read more…] about Two New Books on the Liberal Arts
There’s almost always at least one person who is more gifted than you are at something.
Would you believe that this happens in seminary—where people are taking classes about the Bible and theology?
It does. [Read more…] about Thank God for Gifted Professors and Students
My wife and I recently watched the award-winning documentary Waiting for Superman, and we were stunned when it opened with this clip:
One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist. . . . Even in the depths of the ghetto, you just thought, “He’s coming! I just don’t know when because he always shows up, and he saves all the good people.” . . . [My mother] thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because there was no one coming with enough power to save us.
That’s why this documentary about America’s broken public education system is entitled Waiting for Superman.
A documentary about broken humanity could be entitled the same thing—or maybe Waiting for a Deliverer or Waiting for a Savior.
When I read this practical book a few weeks ago, I thought, “This is the perfect high school graduation gift. And it would also benefit college students, parents, professors, and pastors.”
Alex Chediak. Thriving at College: Make Great Friends, Keep Your Faith, and Get Ready for the Real World! Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2011.
Westminster Books is running a sale that ends on April 5:
About forty people have endorsed it, including Randy Alcorn, David Dockery, Rick Holland, Al Mohler, Chris Morgan, Leland Ryken, Sam Storms, and Bruce Ware.
Chediak, associate professor of engineering and physics at California Baptist University, is the author of With One Voice: Singleness, Dating, and Marriage to the Glory of God and editor of Five Paths to the Love of Your Life. [Read more…] about Thriving at College
Bradley G. Green, The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 179–80:
If what I am arguing is true [pp. 175–78 summarize the book’s argument], then the anti-intellectualism that sometimes marks traditional Christianity needs to be addressed. If the gospel has within it the resources to promote the life of the mind, why do we see anti-intellectualism in portions of the Christian church? I can only offer three brief comments here.
First, it is likely that some persons have been unfairly written off as anti-intellectuals. Christians should be slow to believe what the secular media tells us about this or that Christian group.
Second, much of what passes for intellectual sophistication in contemporary culture is—if we are honest—undeserving of that description. If the acquisition of true knowledge requires—as I have argued in this book—that our hearts and wills be properly ordered, then much of what passes for knowledge is not, in fact, true knowledge.
Third, a pastoral word: C. S. Lewis argued in “Learning in War-Time” that certain Christians are called—by vocation—to apply their minds in a sustained way to the intellectual life. Christians who engage in intensive study should never forget the Christian church. . . . Christians engaging in scholarship should consider the moral obligation of their task. We engage in the life of the mind—at least partially—because we have a moral obligation to help and indeed to protect other Christians as we are able.
Green is not disingenuously generous here. He’s a gracious man, and his brief answer at the end of his book is just that—gracious.
Related: John Piper, “Facing the Challenge of Anti-intellectualism,” in Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 113–50.
