GroshLink

At the end of this week 20+ graduate students and professors from the Pittsburgh region will come together to explore Success and Failure in the University. I am very excited about the opportunity to coordinate this endeavor as I believe this topic is one which academic wrestle with day by day. Please pray for

1. our speakers, Terry Morrison, Director Emeritus of InterVarsity's Faculty Ministry, and Gary Willingham-McLain, Pastor of Friendship Community Church and former CMU professor, to deliver with clarity and participants to engage with the material presentated.

2. last minute registrations to be processed efficiently in order for us to prepare a helpful layout and quantity of materials for those in attendence.

3. the Friday dinner to provide a framework for how to be a godly Influencer of Change in Higher Education.

4. insights into future designs for this conference and related efforts in order to best utilize our time and resources to advance our efforts of being a redemptive influence among the ideas, people, and structures which make up Higher Education.

The university as a business, recently touched on this with Tuition Rise Tops Inflation, but Rate Slows, Report Says, continues to receive press with Presidents of Colleges Cite Finances as Main Issue. Regretfully, I've seen this to be the case. My ideal of a president who sets overall academic direction for the institution, serves as a mentor to professors and students, teaches a class or guess lectures periodically, seems to have faded to the past. For my encouragement, please post examples where this is to some degree the case.

College presidents are more preoccupied with financial issues than educational ones, according to a new survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The presidents said they believed they were judged slightly more on whether they had a balanced budget than for the quality of educational programs. Five of the six top concerns they cited related to money: rising health care costs, rising tuition, financial aid, technology costs and inadequate faculty salaries. The sixth was retaining students.

"While the job of college president is often still filled by former provosts, their top priority these days is more akin to that of a chief financial officer," The Chronicle says in its Nov. 4 issue, available this week.

Surprised to Survey proposes degrees may be equal among universities in the CMU's newspaper the other week. I think that CMU students learn much and their degrees are know to be of great value . . . they're willing to pay a lot for them. Hope to see some op-ed pieces addressing these areas in the coming week.

Just being home in Cenral PA this past weekend, I had the opportunity to swing by Elizabethtown, PA. The visit reminded me that I had failed to post my thoughts on Elizabethtown (a film set in Kentucky which I recently had the opportunity to see).

To get to the point, there was a strong endorsement of small town familial community and love as an antidote to the driven, success oriented consumer culture. Regarding small town America, I do not equate this with the Christian Gospel/counterculture. Yes, this can create a context for redemptive moments, where the noise of our success culture is drowned out, but it is not the be all and end all to answers regarding the search for affirmation, meaning, and community in our contemporary situation.

As for love, it needed a better image to wrap-up w/than bloody salmon swimming upstream for sex and life. To wrap, I thought that the movie lacked the strength to hold its alternative vision of family/community and love to guide one through the crisis points of one's life.

This is not to say that watching Elizabethtown has not provided opportunities for conversation, such as the one we're having right now. But it is to say that despite the starpower and message of family, small town, and love, I do not find Elizabethtown a prophetic word for the mass culture or a cult classic for the evangelical subculture. Love, family, and small town community must be in the larger context of living day by day in the Presence of God and one can be about this just as much in urban life far away from family. These are pieces of and tools through which God expresses Himself in our world. Yes, sometimes we need to go away on a Sabbatical to hear the still small voice, but He is the healing balm where-ever we are in place and personal journey. There is no magic in small town or love.

Other thoughts on Elizabethtown can be found here. If you've seen the film, I'd be interested in yours.

When reflecting on the recent attention given to significant natural disasters and our responsibility to care for others, I found Compassion Fatigue: How Long Can Generosity Be Sustained? a helpful piece.

Below are some notes I took from a presentation shared by Christian Hallstein, Modern Languages/German Professor, with some of our CMU graduate students.

What does in mean to live in Christ day by day?

1. Use of time: learn to rest in what I've accomplished instead of comparitivism, the Scriptures invert our environment's understanding of success. (Like David "My times are in your hands" Psalm 31:15a)

2. Secular vs. sacred: not a problem as the secular = "the fallen," "unreformed;" God reigns over all the earth, our ultimate purpse is to be agents of God which bring the world into conformity with His desires (Col 3:23 Whatever your task work heartily as you're serving God not man; Psalm 24:1 The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, and the people therein)

3. God will show us what to do and how to do it if we keep listening for His Spirit: live one's life in a posture of listening, do not be anxious about what to say or do; eg., Elijah hearing the still small voice in the cave (I Kings 19:12), But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say (Mt 10:19)

4. Some applications coming out of q/a: treat everyone with fairness, be an encourager, develop relationships over time, speak counsel at opportune times

Sin and Grace: The debate over confession in 16th-century Germany introduces The Reformation of the Keys : Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany. The question of why the brief silent/private confession has been with me since childhood. I've benefited much from confession in the context of prayer gatherings of various size or with a pastor in private. Maybe you've thought about this also, here's part of the Books & Culture review which wrestles with this question:

[Martin] Luther himself was a strong advocate of private confession. For him, it was a source of invaluable consolation -- reassurance that the gospel was truly pro me ("for me"). In some ways, Lutheran confession was meant to be an antidote to the penitential mentality of late medieval confession. Congregants need not confess all their sins, but only make a general statement of sinfulness; the pastor was to offer unconditional absolution. There was no need for further penance. Where the medieval sinner was to be kept suspended "between hope and fear," Lutheran confession was meant to instill absolute confidence in personal salvation . . .

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Several of you have wondered about the recipe for the tasty applesauce which we brought to the Graduate Christian Fellowship (GCF) lunch several weeks ago. So here goes:

1. Peel and quarter apples

For those looking for a slightly more scientific recipe . . .

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Another Higher Education Update:

Average college tuition grew more quickly than did overall inflation again this year, although the rate of increase slowed after a period of explosive growth, according to an annual survey released here Tuesday by the College Board . . . Total expenses - including tuition and fees, room and board, books and supplies, transportation and other expenses - now average $15,566 for an undergraduate student attending a public university in his own state, the survey said. Total expenses at private universities now average $31,916.

For more click here

Higher Education Update:

At Public Universities, Warnings of Privatization

"The Morrill Act of 1862 granted federal land to states to finance the creation of public universities, and one of their core missions ever since has been to provide services that promote the well-being of communities and states. Today, educators using the term privatization say universities are being forced to abandon this social compact. In the process, many major public universities are looking more like private ones."

The other week, our Wednesday afternoon discussion of Colossians Remixed had a long discussion regarding the definition of grace, particularly in relationship to the difference between between grace and love. Two recent post on grace include: By Grace Alone on Worship Quote of the Week and an Ephesians Devotional on Urbana 2006.

When reviewing grace and love in the New Bible Dictionary here's a summary of what I found:

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Here's another one from my archives, check out N.T. Wright on Justification available via MP3 download or PDF . . . an introduction offered by Bill Wilder, Center for Christian Study.

The Anglican Bishop of Durham N. T. Wright (commonly addressed as Tom) has written a great deal about the identity of the Church as the people of God called to challenge the reigning gods in the world around them. But while Wright is profoundly interested in questions of Church and culture, much that is written about his work concerns his understanding of soteriology, specifically the way he understands justification. Many of his insights can be explored at his un-official homepage , I'd especially recommend the Q & A section

Another thought provoking piece from the archives of Mars Hill Audio

In this biblical-theological essay, Dr. Edmund Clowney discusses how the Church must resist the temptation to become subservient to earthly political powers and programs. This essay was originally published in the late 1980s as a rebuke to liberation theology and to certain less coherent but no less enthusiastic Christian political movements on the right.

Dr. Clowney was for many years the president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia (where Ken Myers studied under him), and spent his last years as one of our neighbors in Charlottesville. He died in March. Long-time readers of Christianity Today will be interested to know that one of Dr. Clowney's first writing gigs (in the 1950s) was as the pseudonymous humor columnist Eutychus, whose regular satire in the Eutychus and His Kin feature lampooned many of the more curious features of the evangelical subculture. The Politics of the Kingdom is an altogether more serious work, and is available in its original booklet form for purchase, or you may download it for free.

"In today's competitive music world, the temptation is always to make yourself look better by tearing down the reputations of others. As a young man in music school, I was often surrounded by the clash of egos, and, it must be admitted, I had my own struggles in this area. Bach provided a way out.

I remember reading for the first time in my freshman year a simple statement by this master musician. Bach said,

Music's only purpose should be the glory of God and the recreation of the human spirit.

The more I pondered this sentence, the more it liberated my heart. Music was given to glorify God in heaven and to edify men and women on earth. It wasn't to make lots of money, or to meet my ego needs, or to see my name in lights. Music was about blessing the Lord and blessing others. After months of auditions, rehearsals, recitals, and competitions, the simplicity of Bach's statement was a balm for my soul.

-- May all of our work come from such a perspective. Taken from J.S. Bach For the glory of God by Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh, the Artistic Director of the MasterWorks Festival and the Executive Director of the Christian Performing Artists' Fellowship. He is the author of nine books, including Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers (Zondervan, revised edition 1996).

Thanks to Amy for passing along this cartoon on repentance and her comments on common grace . . . will be returning to them when Eden calms down :-0

More fall weekend reading from the Mars Hill Audio archives:

J. Gresham Machen's Christianity & Culture

In the mid-1990s Mars Hill Audio printed a series of essays that we think make important arguments about Christian involvement with culture. We are in the process of converting these to digital files and posting them to our webpages. The first to be made available is Christianity & Culture, by J. Gresham Machen. First presented in an address at Princeton seminary in 1912, this powerful essay argues that many of his contemporaries treated the Gospel with indifference because the cultural climate in which they lived assumed it to be irrelevant. As an antidote, he calls Christians to be energetically involved in cultural life. Christianity & Culture is available in either HTML or PDF formats.

A related essay, J. Gresham Machen and the Problem of Christian Civilization in America, by historian and Machen biographer D. G. Hart, describes the cultural and ecclesiastical setting within which Machen mounted his critique against theological modernism, set forth most succinctly in his book Christianity and Liberalism. This essay is also available in either HTML or PDF formats.

Our weekday breakfast fellowship recently discussed common grace. When going through my archives I found this piece by Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio on the topic. Would love to have your thoughts/reactions.

"I am convinced that if what Christianity was and what culture was were properly understood, a discussion about the doctrine of common grace would be almost unnecessary. One of the reasons the doctrine of common grace has become a lost teaching, an unfamiliar idea, is that modern Christians, especially evangelical Christians, have made some crucial mistakes in their thinking about Christianity and culture." -- Ken Myers from Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace, online (via PDF file).

"The truth is, Mitch, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live . . . if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time -- then you might not be as ambitious as you are" (Tuesdays w/Morrie, pp.82-3).

Several people have asked me how I (Tom) carry on w/all of the difficulties we have have faced as a family. Although Morrie's encouragement to embrace our fragility is courageous, I have more resonance w/day by day dependence upon God and the people of God.

 

Dave Bailey's One More Day, alongside the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23, began to articulate this for me during Elise Faith's brief life and found an even deeper resonance during my cancer treatment. His work was birthed by living day by day in Christ through the treatment of a malignant brain tumor, click here for his bio. We would encourage you to take a moment to browse his site and reflect upon some of his songs.

In particular, don't miss:

Another holy Morning

If I had Another

May the words bless you as they do our family.  (More)

Dear Brothers & Sisters in Christ,

Yesterday, Ryan suggested we take 15 minutes to reflect upon how we understand Freedom in the Gospel. A number of things came to my mind:

Freedom to be children of God, to find/root our identity in Christ Freedom to love, our blindness toward others/neighbor taken away (More)

We know that many of you have been anxiously waiting for more news regarding Eden's condition. On Sept. 15 she had her follow up MRI where we were told that the mass in her brainstem had gotten bigger. We discussed the possibility of biopsy and revisited the possibility that the mass was a tumor and not vascular. Our doctors conferred with doctors from Boston and the experts were split 50/50--half thought tumor and half thought vascular. But they determined that biopsy was too risky.

Meanwhile, Theresa and Eden traveled to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to visit friends and enjoyed an immensely relaxing and enjoyable time. It felt good to get away from the crisis and pretend that everything was normal. The day after returning to Pgh Eden had a type of MRI called an MRS. We knew there was a good chance that this test would be inconclusive, which it proved to be. Our doctor also sent Eden's scans to the neuro team at Johns Hopkins for them to review it. They are of the opinion that it is a cavernous angioma. This is the same diagnosis we had been given earlier this spring. Treatment is to watch and wait, with another MRI to be done around the new year. JH doctors wouldn't touch it (surgically) with a 10 foot pole.

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