By: Chad McSwain on October 7, 2022
“You have to embrace your authority as a pastor.” That was a common theme in my conversations as I prepared for ordination. I would meet with my mentor pastor and she would consistently tell me to embrace my authority, or more accurately, the identity of being a pastor. It was a threshold that I needed…
By: Nicole Richardson on October 7, 2022
Jason challenged us at the beginning of the Advance, to be open to the strange and stranger; to lean into that which is out of our control or comfort zone. I do not know about anyone else, but my mind is still grappling with the experience in Cape Town. So much to unpack, but I…
By: Kristy Newport on October 7, 2022
The Mona Lisa has been credited as the most famous piece of art. How can this be accepted carte blanche? One must stop and consider this assertion. How has this one portrait been given this kind of notoriety? If a piece of art has been set apart by so many over a span of 519…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on October 6, 2022
According to the research and concluding theories of Jan Meyer and Ray Land, students can experience quite a range of success or lack of success, based on their ability to grasp and digest certain key concepts in the curriculum. Some students progress through the learning process easily and successfully, while others struggle to grasp these crucial…
By: Michael O'Neill on October 6, 2022
The carpenter in me sees the word “threshold” and immediately a transition strip or door trim of some kind comes to mind. The Kinesiologist in me sees “threshold” as a maximum output or delineation of a new system in the body activating. The student in me sees something completely unique in regard to learning and…
By: Daron George on October 6, 2022
Giving words to the moment is the thought that comes to mind when I consider this week’s readings from Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land’s works Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practicing within the disciplines, and Threshold concepts in practice. For the past…
By: Jonathan Lee on October 6, 2022
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist who received the Templeton prize in 1983. He is known for his criticism of communism and for raising global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union. When he received the Templeton prize and gave his speech in 1983, I was five years old. Although I heard about the…
By: Caleb Lu on October 6, 2022
Jan H.F. Meyer and Ray Land’s “Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding” introduce the ideas of “threshold concepts”. Threshold concepts, according to Meyer and Land, are “akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which…
By: Elmarie Parker on October 6, 2022
When I share the story of how I’ve experienced God at work in the Middle East with local congregations or other interested groups in the USA, I often receive this question: “What unbiased source can we read in order to better understand what is happening in the Middle East?” What I have learned from my…
By: Henry Gwani on October 6, 2022
In The Upheaval, Lyons paints a landscape of the unprecedented change that is sweeping across the world. He notes that the key players include China, driving geopolitical change; America, influencing global culture and ideas; and the rest of the world managing technological innovations at a rate that is previously unheard of. The revolutions Lyons describes…
By: Becca Hald on October 6, 2022
When I was in high school, there was a popular series of books and posters called “Magic Eye.” The images look like a mesh of color at first glance, but if you view them in a specific way, a three-dimensional image emerges. I remember looking at them in frustration, trying to see these images my…
By: Troy Rappold on October 6, 2022
In his blog entitled, “The Upheaval,” N.S. Lyons makes the case in his essay Introducing the Revolutions Upending Our World that we are living in era of human history that has never before experienced so much change, so rapidly. “We are experiencing a tectonic upheaval, a rending, uprooting . . . from one era of…
By: Roy Gruber on October 6, 2022
I believe that the entirety of the Bible is valuable for life and faith. If I’m honest, however, I admit that the prophets are not my favorite place to read and ponder. Amidst the promises of God, bad news rules. Ultimately, God wins but the current state of things often receives strong words of correction.…
By: Michael Simmons on October 5, 2022
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest thinkers in modern history, will always be remembered simply for this statement: “God is dead.” The current geopolitical nationalistic fundamentalism, or “New Faith” could be seen as a response to the statement. In the United States far-right politicians are Christianizing their platforms and deifying their agenda. Regardless of motive,…
By: Jean de Dieu Ndahiriwe on October 5, 2022
Ray Land, Jan H. F. Meyer, and Michael T. Flanagan (Eds.) have done a great job introducing the threshold Concepts. It comes with five parts that include Theoretical Directions, Negotiating Liminality, Threshold Concepts and Interdisciplinarity, The Doctoral Journey, and Threshold Concepts in Professional Practice. “It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of discourses of…
By: Andy Hale on October 5, 2022
Is it possible to be an unbiased news source in our era of relative truth? N.S. Lyons’ The Upheaval seeks to rise above the noise of political and social ideologies to examine what is happening in our times and how it is changing our world. In his post, “Introducing the Revolutions Upending Our World,” Lyons examines the…
By: Eric Basye on October 5, 2022
Reading Lyons article, “The Upheaval,” and Solzhenitsyn’s “Men Have Forgotten God” speech, I am challenged to consider, what value does a geopolitical framework provide Christians in engaging the world? Lyons argues that we are living in a time of “epochal change” in which at least three revolutions have impacted the world. One is a geopolitical…
By: Kayli Hillebrand on October 4, 2022
In reading Lyons and Solzhenitsyn this week, my mind took me in several directions, most of which ended up at a place of feeling ‘I can’t help but think that we’ve been here before.’ Perhaps it was in the Garden of Eden when we chose to listen to a voice other than the Creator. Or…
By: Greg McMullen on October 4, 2022
Through out my life, I have had pinnacle moments in my life where I have had to change. Sometimes I have even fought wanting to change, sometimes even dragging my feet when its God pulling me into a new direction. I have found that I can become very comfortable and complacent in systems, routines, ministry,…
By: David Beavis on October 4, 2022
Seven years. From the sixth grade to graduating high school, seven years total, I took Spanish. This subject was taken seriously. I wanted to learn! Picturing myself speaking was enticing. However, nearly a year after graduating from high school, I was in Nicaragua for Spring Break. To my dismay, I had forgotten everything. All of…
