Campus Gleanings Januray 20, 2009

Dear Friends,

 Here’s a dose of resources that popped my way recently.  Enjoy.

 1.Andre Basson’s Campus Ministry Editorial
2. Jamie Smith’s Blog on the State of the University
3. Article:  Best and Brightest Lead Us off Cliff
4. Article:  Students need Purpose Today
5. Article: George Marsden on Christian Colleges
6. Article: Mark Driscoll’s Populist Neo-Calvinism
7. Article: Men and Porn (Guardian 2003)
8. Articles: on how media rots the brain

 

1.  Andre Basson wrote an article on campus ministry for the latest issue of The Christian Courier.  Its great stuff. 

 2.  Jamie Smith’s blog has a reflective piece on Stanley Fish’s views of the state of the University see Monday, January 19, 2009 entry at http://forsclavigera.blogspot.com/

3.  Jason Postma forwarded me this diatribe on the ills of specialization, jargon, entitlement, and elitism and how they perpetuate this system we are stuck in: The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff  http://www.alternet.org/story/111376

From Harry Lew (#4-6): 

4.  An essay excerpted from The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life, by William Damon (Free Press, 2008).  http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/30902774.html

5.  George Marsden on “ Why Christian Colleges are Thriving” http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/01/by_george_marsden_evangelical.html

 6.   January 11, 2009 Who Would Jesus Smack Down?
By MOLLY WORTHEN for the NEW YORK TIMES
The Seattle minister Mark Driscoll is out to transform American evangelicalism with his macho conception of Christ and neo-Calvinist belief in the total depravity of man.

7. “Men and Porn”—(I thought it was fitting to put it after an article on total depravity).  This just came across my desk this week but its from 2003.  Not an issue that is passé, however. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/08/gender.weekend7

8.  A Maclean’s article on how new media rots the brain:  “Dumbed down:  The troubling science of how technology is rewiring kids’ brains” suggests this:

Every new technology—from books to television—has brought with it fears of a resulting mind-melt. The difference, in the case of digital technologies, says Dr. Gary Small, a renowned neuroscientist at the University of California , Los Angeles , is the unprecedented pace and rate of change. It is creating what he calls a “brain gap” between young and old, forged in a single generation. “Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool,” Small writes in his new book, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, “has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically.”

See the rest at:  http://blog.macleans.ca/2008/11/07/dumbed-down/

For more on this topic see on the Internet:  That's why they call them browsers by Ken Myers, and Is Google Making Us Stupid?   by Nicholas Carr.