UA Christian Staff and Faculty Fellowship - Continuing Chapter 3 - Rules of the game, 3/10

Come to the Christian Faculty and Staff Fellowship on Wednesday, 3/10, at 11:45 AM (done by 12:45 PM). 

We'll finish Chapter 3 of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship by George M. Marsden. The Amazon links are:

• Paperback: https://amzn.to/3pIQRwL
• Kindle: https://amzn.to/32W0iPM 

From the abstract on Amazon: "Marsden argues forcefully that mainstream American higher education needs to be more open to explicit expressions of faith and to accept what faith means in an intellectual context." 

Meeting logistics 

We'll continue to meet on Zoom until it's clear that staff, faculty, and students are fully back on campus and pursuing their regular activities. I'll keep checking for announcements about that. 

The Zoom link is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87919167217?pwd=cVJjbHhUaXhidllPMkM1UXVCbzc0QT09 

You're welcome to eat your lunch during the session. 

Items of interest 

We had a great meeting with Peter Bonilla, Vice President of Programs for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), who discussed the free expression rights of faculty in higher ed. It turns out you have greater rights than you think to express yourself. 

Peter also provided a number of resources (links are embedded):

• FIRE has resources to help faculty understand their rights.
• FIRE also has guides to students' rights of expression on campus.
• The FIRE Faculty Network Conference allows faculty to gather and discuss free speech and academic freedom.
• FIRE is launching a legal defense fund to support faculty at public institutions.
• FIRE's High School Network is a resource parents and educators may be interested in.
• The FIRE comic books provide an engaging introduction to high school students' First Amendment rights.
• FIRE's Spotlight Database gives traffic light (red, yellow, green) ratings to colleges and universities based on the degree to which they restrict free speech. Along with other schools, UA has a rating.
• Their Spotlight on Speech Codes lays out trends and issues affecting expression in higher education. 

If you would like to take up some questions with Peter, you can contact him at peter@thefire.org. 

Phil Bishop recommended this webinar featuring Dr. John Lennox (Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Oxford University) discussing whether science and philosophy have buried God. This is relevant to the discussions we're having on Professor Marsden's book.

• Mention is made of Dr. Lennox's book, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Dr. Yohannes Abate, Susan Dasher and Charles Dasher MD Professor of Physics at the University of Georgia, is the moderator.
• He is also the central figure in the documentary movie Against the Tide: Finding God in an Age of Science.
• The preamble is interesting, and the substance of the webinar starts at 4:50. 

Upcoming speaker: Rev Peter Leithart, President of the Theopolis Institute, on 3/31. 

These happened on 3/10

• 1880. The first English Salvation Army mission to the US arrived in New York City.
• 1937 Arnold Toynbee wrote, "In this really very brief period of less than 2,000 years, Christianity has in fact produced greater spiritual effects in the world than have been produced in a comparable space of time by any other spiritual movement that we know of in history."