Mutterings...

[jsph123]

    Today I find myself wishing to write, with God in mind and also in the background of my writing.  I stumbled upon some stuff I had copied off of another's page, and today I wish to respond in a general way.
He had been rambling on about a dinner he had been invited to, and a woman he had encountered at the dinner table, whose ideas of God were

Comments

[ptbirdsong]

Last May I received a Bachelor's Degree in Religious Studies from a secular liberal arts college. I am proud to say that excepting a few professors (a rabbi, a nun, and a member of my own denomination) I do not know the religious inclinations of my professors. Furthermore I feel confident that whatever inclinations any of them had that they were well learned in their subjects, and were professional in their duties as teachers of their particular subjects. To act professionally in a secular university is to show more than one side of any particular issue. In my first class with the rabbi he talked mostly about separating the pulpit from the podium. He strives (and achieves) to teaching from only the podium. To teach from the pulpit is both unprofessional and unethical in that setting. Also, college is not primarily about learning facts. That is what high school is supposed to be for. In college you are supposed to learn how to take facts and apply them to ideas, and how to use facts to discover your own ideas. While, yes, you certainly learn lots of facts in your studies, your primary mission is to learn how the facts work together to create a whole. Undergraduate studies are a very "big picture" style of learning. The facts are important, but only the trees that make up the forest. The forest is really what college is all about.

Are some professors arrogant and self-righteous? Certainly, but that has more to do with the personality of the individual professor than the underlying principles of liberal arts education. And those professors seem to be in the great minority. I see a lot of fear and paranoia from many evangelicals about the nature of liberal arts education (including use of the word "liberal" even though in this setting has NO political or moral value, merely meaning something like "broad scope"), but that seems to me to be more out of fear of their children "falling away" from their faith. The trouble is though, and I speak from my own experience and observing that of others, that if one's faith is well grounded in the first place, then no manner of facts one picks up in a college classroom can shake that faith and if your faith is shaken by those facts, it wasn't built on a solid foundation in the first place.