News & Events

Plenary sessions

For professors, future professors, and spouses

"Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:19)

Plenary Session 1

Christianity and the New University Terrain -- Dr. Douglas Jacobsen and Dr. Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, Messiah College

The terrain of American higher education is changing and is more open to religion today than it has been for several decades. How should Christian scholars react? The Jacobsens will describe the current situation in higher education based on research they have conducted over the past two years and then will offer a “toolbox” of four different approaches to Christian scholarship. Discussion time will focus on the implications of the new terrain for our own scholarship and our work with students.

Come prepared to discuss these issues with other Christian professors from your campus and your academic discipline. You will have opportunities to talk about practical ways for you to be used by God in your academic sphere of influence.

Plenary Session 2

Taking Integration to the Next Level: Discernment, Disintegration/ Integration, and Transformation -- Dr. Mary Poplin, Professor of Education, Claremont Graduate University

The worldviews dominant in the academic fields include naturalism/materialism, secular humanism, and pantheism. The principles of each of these include ones that the Judeo-Christian worldview confirm. However there are also errors of commission and omission inherent in these worldviews that must be discerned and addressed. True integration is not simply melding some Christian principles into existing secular worldviews or vice versa. Rather we should seek God given and guided wisdom to discern the errors in secular theories so as to both deconstruct and reconstruct our fields leading to the transformation of our minds, our fields, our teaching and our lives.

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual [hosts] of wickedness in the heavenly [places]." Ephesians 6:12