What is university like? Is it possible to be a Christian there? What does it mean to live well as a student? If you know someone heading off to university this year, they may be asking themselves these kinds of questions. If they’re not asking these, it’s definitely to be encouraged.
To help, I’m pleased to introduce Transitions 2011: Equipping you for the Journey of Faith at University; an event organised by Scripture Union, the Tertiary Students Christian Fellowship (“TSCF”) and associated students. This is the introduction to university I wish I’d had three years ago.
There are lots of challenges that young people face when moving into an environment of independent learning. Also, the university is a place where, at least theoretically, ‘truth’ matters. I’m convinced that Christian claims are true – given the modern environment, this raises yet more challenges. All of these are things that are best dealt with in community. There are plenty of people out there thinking about the same subjects, hoping to live as we were intended; but how to find them without being too weird about it?
The campuses of tertiary institutions are not always associated with strong communities. A common desire to get drunk ~ once a week, have fun and do well enough to get a decent job is not much to base meaningful relationships on. Three years, to get your standard degree, is not a long time, so turnover is high (in that regard, I see the trend towards doing more post-grad study as a real positive). Large campuses filled with strangers can also be daunting. Auckland in particular has many, many, students commuting in and out of the city and not bothering or daring to build networks in their place of study, beyond those they’ve inherited through accidents of geography and prior schooling. Christian groups and Christian individuals who care about more than their own advancement are uniquely equipped to fill the gaps in friendship and exploring the deeper questions which study raises.
Ultimately, young adults want to shape a world-view that’s big enough to include their experience of the human condition and the knowledge we have gained. Events like Transitions help to break the ice and get students talking and laughing and eating and thinking together; all ultimately for the glory of the God who cares about what we know and who we know.
So come along, there will be pizza, sessions on “Being the same person sitting in church and sitting in class,” “Exploring how Uni is different from school,” “What are the issues for Korean students?” and a whole lot more so mark it in your calendars now:
What: Transitions 2011
When: Saturday the 5th February
Time: 12-4:30pm
Where: The University of Auckland Business School (OGGB5), 12 Grafton Rd, University of Auckland
For: Students entering their first or second year of tertiary study
See and pass on the flyer for more details (including how to register) and/or this Facebook page, organised by one of the TSCF groups.
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Students should try to discipline themselves to be reading—daily—small bits of a good logic textbook all the way through during their time at the university. A page a day would be fine. This will eventually give them a definite advantage in all subjects, even though it may not seem so for months into the project. One of the greatest Greek scholars of all time once said that if you translate only six sentences per day of new material in ancient Greek, twenty years later you will be one of the top scholars in that field. The same principle applies here, and to any subject really. I suggest Oesterle’s Logic: The Art of Defining and Reasoning, which, while quite old, is very good for starters, then Richard Purtill’s two books, Logic For Philosophers and Logic: Argument, Refutation, and Proof, and finally a great textbook for depth and scope in philosophy would be the monumental Logic as a Human Instrument, written by two theists, Francis Parker and the renown Aristotelian scholar Henry B. Veatch.