Christian Worldview Bootcamp for Houston High School Students

At Houston Baptist University, we’ve started up a really nice partnership with John Mark Reynolds and Wheatstone Academy to offer Christian worldview programming for high school students during the summer. If you live in or around Houston and have a student who could use (or would enjoy!) an intellectual boot camp for the faith, this is it. The program goes from July 26 to August 1. The cost is $850 and is all inclusive of food, lodging, events, etc.

This is exactly what your student needs before going to college, especially if you will be sending them off to a state school.

Read more here.

Obama’s First Hundred Days . . . at HBU!

Here in Houston, the time has come to issue judgment on the first hundred days of the Obama administration.  Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, and Mike Gallagher are coming to the Dunham Theater of the Morris Cultural Arts Center at Houston Baptist University tomorrow night (Wednesday) to offer their critique of the president’s program so far.

The event is sponsored by the local conservative talker, KNTH 1070 AM and has provoked a lot of interest around the city.  We expect over 1000 Houstonians to attend, but there just might be a ticket or two left.  Here’s the link for the event.

And before the political balance police get up in arms, I would like to add the footnote that HBU is merely providing the forum to the radio station.  We did the same for the Holocaust Museum by hosting Madeline Albright several months ago.

Christian Higher Education

I have spent the last five years of my life with two goals.

One has been to write a book about secularism which would demonstrate what I believe to be the uselessness of the concept.  That goal has been achieved.  The End of Secularism comes out in August 2009 with Crossway Books.

The other has been to do anything I can to take Christian higher education to the next level.  I worked to that end while trying to save the presidency of Robert Sloan at Baylor University.  What I saw there was a growing community of serious Christian scholars taking shape.  Those on the outside can laugh if they want, but what I saw happening there in Waco was the first emerging signs of a Christian Ivy.  Baylor is surprisingly large with about 15,000 students.  It is part of the Big 12 athletic conference.  The endowment is over a billion dollars.  However, since Dr. Sloan left Baylor the basic identity of the school has remained in doubt.  I cannot say who will prevail.  It will either be an alliance of iiberals and Christian pietists who think their faith is private or it will be Christians dedicated to bringing their faith and scholarship together.  I certainly hope the latter group eventually runs the school.

I just received the latest issue of the Baylor Alumni Association’s magazine.  They have consistently been against the Sloan vision for a renaissance of Christian higher education.  The issue contained a series of suggestions from various alumni and other stakeholders on how to unify Baylor.  I was particularly repulsed by a letter from retired professor Rufus Spain who dripped contempt for the new “world class” (quotes added by him) faculty at Baylor.  I don’t get that.  Why wouldn’t you want your university to improve?  Why wouldn’t you be happy to be associated with people who have reached the top rank of their profession?  I don’t fancy myself a great Christian scholar, but I am thrilled to see them do their work and to help them influence the culture.

I finished my own doctoral work in December 2007 and have joined Dr. Sloan at Houston Baptist University to continue the project of renewal for Christian higher education.  I have been there nearly a year and a half and have never had such good work to do in all my life.  Culturally speaking, we dare not ignore the university.  College students are amazingly open.  They are thinking everything through and are figuring out:

• What work they will do
• What their view of the world is
• Whether they will go to church
• Whom they will marry
• How they will vote

And a number of other things about life.  Christian universities need to be attractive and ready to meet the challenge of mentoring students.  It is clear to me that while it is good to have big cultural ministries like Focus on the Family, we have underinvested in colleges and universities.  These institutions are force-multipliers, better than think tanks and policy institutes by far.  At our colleges and universities we can have both character and worldview formation of the young AND research and publication by our faculty.  This is where many of us need to be working and giving today.

More IKE and HBU

UPDATE:  Forget what I said about electricity.  The university still does not have power.  I’m praying it will be restored on Friday.

I promise to return to blogging about things other than the storm, but right now I’m furtively grabbing a little access outside a Panera that has no food, but does have internet access.  Bless them.

The university has probably just gotten its electricity back by today.  I visited yesterday and checked out the damage.  Our main administrative buildings are in really bad shape.  The good news is that we can largely protect the student experience because of our newer facilities built in the last year.  The less good news is that my office is part of what will likely be condemned and I’ll probably be working from a laptop on somebody’s porch, LIKE NOW.

In seriousness, there is a lot of work to be done.  We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress at HBU during the last couple of years.  We’ll do everything we can in God’s providence to protect that momentum and keep moving forward.  If you want to pray for us, pray for strong support from donors and alumni.  Also pray for good natured and honest insurance adjusters.

And if you should just happen to want to make a tax deductible donation or just keep up with the last information, go to www.hbu.edu.

A Publication for the City of God

For the last year, I’ve worked at Houston Baptist University where we are striving to push Christian higher education to a new level.  Part of our strategy has been to publish a journal of Christian thought aimed at the educated layperson.

We call it The City.  Please check it out and consider signing up for a free subscription.  We aim to be provocative, thoughtful, and most important, interesting.

The Summer 2008 issue of The City features:

• Louis Markos on Milton and the Thorny Road to Truth
• Tim Keller on Bringing the Gospel to the City
• The Ten Pillars: An Introduction to a Vision
• Patrick Deneen on Culture, Technology, and Virtue
• Joseph Knippenberg on Man’s War with Nature
• Joe Carter on Evangelicals and an Uncertain Manifesto
• Reviews of Anne Rice’s Road to Cana
• George Washington on Church and State
• Ryan T. Anderson Explains Benedict for Baptists
• Hunter Baker on Charles Colson’s Faith
• With Poetry from A.E. Stallings and Jayme Metzgar
• And the Word Spoken by the Rev. John Knox