Everyone puts their faith in something.
Professors are no different.
Students should be taught how to wrestle with ideas. That’s what we do at Comenius.
Watch our two minute video (full text appears below).
At Comenius, we believe that ideas change people and people change culture.
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from Comenius (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), hosts a weekly radio program with diverse groups of guests (1 minute video), and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).
Picture Credit: Snappy Goat
FULL TEXT:
Over lunch, one of the students in our Comenius discussion gave this account:
In a lecture this week, my prof said ‘humans are basically good.’
When I asked upon what the instructor based her position, the student responded, “She included, her ‘experience,’ ‘research,’ and her ‘degrees’ as the basis for her position.”
At the lunch table, Comenius students discussed the comment. We engaged the thinking of multiple sources such as Salon, Huffington Post, First Things, and the Wall Street Journal. It was clear to all that the phrase “humans are basically good” was an ‘assumption,’ a matter of ‘doctrine,’ becoming the professor’s personal ‘belief.’
One student said, “When someone begins thinking with a faith commitment, all her other thinking will be permeated by that faith.”
Later in the day I received a text message from one of the students who had joined our discussion. She wrote
Just an hour after our meeting the subject we discussed at lunch was brought up in class. I was glad we discussed multiple points of view since I was only hearing one in my class.
At Comenius we love helping students to intelligently wrestle with and strategically apply their Christian faith to difficult issues. We help support and equip young Christians on campus to connect biblical wisdom with life’s questions. “Where Christian wisdom and life connect,” is not simply our tagline, it is a lifeline to young believers who navigate academic waters on a public university campus.
One of our students said it this way:
Having a place to discuss anything with friends and a professor who cares has helped me to see the intersection of the ideas I’m discussing in classes, allowing me to wrestle with points of conflict in a group setting. God is not absent on my campus.
For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking Truth wherever it’s found.
If you trust that human nature is basically good it can help with attitude and expectations for education as the solution, etc. You simply need to educate someone to make a good, better, or the best choice and they ostensibly will actually do so.
The trick is the reading of any newspaper. Consider the world news or news concerning corporations, unions, governments, judicial, economic with ENRON, Worldcomm, Martha S, higher-ups in the Justice Dept, FBI, IRS, academic department politics, and even the studious intentional lack of intellectual diversity alluded to in ‘truth in two’ above. Reality hits like a freight train. And the whole arena of ‘highly educated barbarians’ comes into view rather quickly and pervasively and without much regard for EQ, IQ, privilege, etc.
One gets the uneasy feeling that things weren’t intended to be this way. Ought not to be this way. And we imagine some kind of justice be it social, biblical, racial, economic… will eventually come and right/correct/fix these things. And we imagine that we can have a significant and meaningful role in that process even now.
But upon what bases do such thoughts find grounds? Dare I say the Hebraic Christian worldview of creation, fall, redemption, consummation? I sure don’t find it in naturalism, karma, nihilism, dualism, or deism.