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Lectures
ARIHE Lectureship
The Association of Reformed
Institutions of Higher Education (ARIHE) has established a lectureship
on Reformed Christian Higher Education. Lecturers selected from member
institutions will be available for the 2006-2008 academic year.
The lecturers will be
selected by the ARIHE Executive Committee from the nominations made
by the Prseident's and Chief Academic Officers of member institutions.
The lecturers will be established scholars whose work is a model of
the type of scholarship that is distinctive at these colleges. They
will also be prepared to address issues that are extant on the member
campuses.
Purpose
The purpose
of the lectureship is to:
1. Provide
models of scholarship that reflect the mission and character of Reformed
Christian Institutions
2. Present
theological and philosophical foundations of Christian higher education.
3. Shape
a community of Reformed Christian higher education and scholarship that
are within ARIHE.
The Lectures
are intended to support faculty development efforts on the ARIHE campuses.
ARIHE Lectureship
2006-2008
Featuring Dr.
Charles Adams, Dr. Susan Felch,
and Dr. Michael Vander Weele.
Dr. Charles
Adams
Dr. Adams
is Dean of the Natural Sciences Division and Professor of Engineering
at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. He received a B.S. from New
Jersey Institute of Technology, an M.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, an M.A. from Montclair University, and a Ph.D. from The University
of Iowa. He has worked as an engineer in the aircraft industry, taught
physics and chemistry at a Christian high school, and in 1979 was called
to initiate the
engineering program at Dordt College. His academic interests range from
thermal-fluid systems stewardship to an attempt to bring the wisdom
of Dutch neo-Calvinism and Kierkegaardian existentialism to bear on
the problems of modern technology and technological education.
Lectures:
- Beyond the Two Cultures:
A Reformed Answer to C.P. Snow in Theory and Practice
In his 1959 Rede Lecture,
C.P. Snow coined the phrase “the two cultures” to describe
the worldview chasm that exists between scientists and nonscientists.
That same year Thomas Kuhn, in a speech entitled “The Essential
Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research,” described
the methodological differences between those who do academic work
in the natural sciences and those whose fields of study encompass
the humanities. This lecture will present an analysis of the two cultures
divide from a Reformed perspective and will argue for a unified perspective
that enables us to appreciate technology and the natural sciences
as “humanities” and the study of the humanities as scientific
activity.
- Naturalism, Nanotechnology,
and Our “Post-human” Future: A Reformed Perspective
Advances in technology
at the end of the twentieth century have provoked some scholars to
predict a future where humans and computers merge to evolve an immortal,
post-human “life form” that is free and capable of defining
its own “nature.” Others react against such “brave
new world” scenarios with horror at the prospect of “losing
our essential humanity.” What does it mean to be human? What
are the limitations and the potential of technology with respect to
shaping our humanity? This lecture will begin to offer answers to
those questions by contrasting a Reformed Christian worldview with
the worldviews of naturalism and by suggesting how elements of naturalistic
worldviews have too often corrupted Christian worldviews on science
and technology.
- Teaching “Technical
Courses” from a Christian Perspective: A Reformed Approach to
Pedagogy
Christian education
in the Reformed tradition claims to bring a distinctive worldview
to bear on every subject in the curriculum. Yet Christian teachers
struggle to “teach christianly” in areas such as the natural
sciences, mathematics, and technology. How does a Christian teacher
avoid the near hypocritical practice of simply “sprinkling”
prayer or a few Bible verses onto an otherwise secularist curriculum
or lesson plan in order to call it “Christian?” This lecture
will suggest how teaching (mathematics, natural science, or any subject
that might be called “technical”) from a Christian perspective
ought to and can be distinguished from the kind of teaching that occurs
in a secular environment.
Dr. Susan
M. Felch
Dr. Felch
is Professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. She received
her bachelor and master’s degrees from Wheaton College and her
Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. She
has written and lectured on sixteenth-century British literature as
well as the intersections of religion, literature, and literary theory.
In addition to numerous articles, her publications include Bakhtin and
Religion: A Feeling for Faith (2001), co-edited with Paul J. Contino;
The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (1999); and the forthcoming
Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and
Evening Prayers (2007). She has also co-edited with Gary Schmidt a set
of anthologies on the four seasons, each volume of which is subtitled
A Spiritual Biography of the Season.
Lectures:
- Reformed Aesthetics:
Rethinking Work and Beauty
Although the “art
in action” metaphor is helpful at many levels, it tends to foster
a utilitarian view of art to the exclusion of a serious consideration
of beauty. In literary studies, we come to value hermeneutics (what
does a poem or story say) over poetics (how does a poem or story say)
and may treat narratives primarily as moral exempla. Calvin’s
understanding of the general sacraments, such as the tree of life
in Eden or the sign of the rainbow, can help us recover a reformed
aesthetics that views art not just in terms of the transformation
of culture, but also in terms of plenitude, analogy, and the naming
and shaping of secondary worlds.
- Doubt and the Hermeneutics
of Delight
Doubt, and the critical
distance it engenders, may be the quintessential virtue of the university,
but Christians should be skeptical of letting it shape the landscape
of their pedagogy and scholarship. Doubt is merely one stage in the
pilgrimage of belief. Within the grand narrative of the Christian
story, there is certainly suffering, death, unanswered questions,
even despair, but there is also—just as powerfully—beauty,
hope, life, and promise.
As we work within the hermeneutics of delight, we see that it helps
to set us free from the imperial self, to enlarge our imaginations,
and to enable us to look up and around at the world. Delight is not
sentimental or nostalgic, but it does dismantle doubt as a virtue
and resituates doubting within a larger meaningful context.
- Naming the Animals
The task of Christian
scholarship begins in Genesis 2 with the naming of the animals, but
some of the complications of that work are explored in Matthew 14,
where the overlapping and multiform claims of Word, world, and words
collide. Historically, reformed pedagogy and scholarship has emphasized
the transformation of culture, but thinking about the claims of doctrine
and piety, as well as the call to transformation, can refresh the
conversation on what it means to be a teacher and scholar in the reformed
tradition.
Dr. Michael
Vander Weele
Dr. Vander
Weele is Professor of English at Trinity Christian College in Palos
Heights, Illinois. He received his B.A. from Trinity and Ph.D. from
the University of Iowa. He has taught Renaissance, 19th Century, and
20th Century literature and has published essays on authors as different
in time and temperament as Augustine and Raymond Carver. His primary
interest is in the history of interpretation and, most recently, in
the resources in John Calvin’s thought for viewing literature
as a sophisticated social communication.
Note: As recent guest editor for the Christian Scholar’s Review,
Vander Weele would also be happy to talk more informally about Christian-Muslim
dialogue and its implications for our teaching.
Lectures:
- Calvin as Resource for
a Rhetorical Aesthetics
This lecture takes as
its starting point Martha Woodmansee’s charge that aesthetics
is in its beginning a dislocated theology. While Woodmansee favors
the purification of aesthetics from theology, other possibilities
include a better interaction between the two. John Calvin’s
emphasis on exchange, both in his Institutes and in his 1542 Catechism,
gives us a way to reconsider the usefulness of art and to place its
aesthetic qualities within
the context of a social rhetoric.
- Strategies of Exchange
in George Herbert’s Catechism & Poetry
This lecture begins
with George Herbert’s unusual, for its time, instruction to
teach the catechism in Socratic fashion. Then it considers Stanley
Fish’s argument that what Herbert says about teaching the catechism
is also key to understanding his poetry. This lecture accepts the
close link between Herbert’s catechism instruction and his poetry
but develops a different argument about their purpose. It asks for
a more social and anthropological reading of the poems.
- The Entanglements of
Public and Private Life in Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead
This lecture takes Marilynn
Robinson’s new novel as a noble and rich challenge to a theory
of art as social exchange. It considers critics’ early comparison
of the novel’s prose to poetry or prayer and then asks us to
reconsider what poetry and prayer might look like, in the light of
Robinson’s writing and in the light of an alternative interpretive
tradition.
Download
the Offical ARIHE 2006-2008 Brochure
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