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…
By: Becca Hald on October 3, 2022
Nelson Mandela has a gift of story telling. For the most part, I have enjoyed listening to his autobiography on Audible. Until I got to the part where he described prison life on Robben Island. I was tired, still recovering from my vaccines in preparation for Cape Town, and my emotional resilience was low. I…
By: Laura Fleetwood on October 1, 2022
Walking the same streets as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu was an experience I will never forget. Before reading their auto-biographies, I did not know a great deal of knowledge about either man, but I now view them as primary examples of differentiated leaders as we are studying this semester. Edwin Friedman describes the following…
By: Chad McSwain on September 29, 2022
Horns of a dilemma. That is the term in philosophy to describe the logical fallacy of only being offered two positions, with both being the worst possible outcome. That is what I think of when reflecting on the position of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission is caught between ignoring the damage of…
By: Mary Kamau on September 19, 2022
“Unless you know the road you’ve come from, you cannot know where you’re going,” an African proverbial saying that underscores the default recourse to history to predict the future or to find an explanation for current phenomena, came to mind as I read the book, Global Leadership Perspectives. by Simon Western and Eric – Jean…
By: Shonell Dillon on September 19, 2022
Have you ever been in a place that felt like home, a place you never thought you would ever leave? Have you had to leave unwillingly? I will raise my own hands to these questions. Unfortunately, this was not my home that I had to leave. I had to leave a church. A holy place,…
By: Chad McSwain on September 16, 2022
“I would like feedback more often. In fact, I like it, at the end of staff meeting, when you go around to each person and ask us the most important thing we have to do this week.” That was feedback I recently received while going an evaluation for a new employee. I was more clued…
