It is a very good article on a topic that really is a challenge for everyone, not just institutions. Everyone needs to ask themselves, what does my facebook/twitter/blog say about myself. If you are happy with the answer then you don’t have anything to worry about.

This is a bit of what I will be talking about at this year’s SBL: “On the Internet no one knows you’re a grad student.” Or how social media can help you, build you up, and tear you down.

Academics and Colleges Split Their Personalities for Social Media

By Jeffrey R. Young

Christian Brady, an associate professor of classics and dean of the Schreyer Honors College at Pennsylvania State University, has created two Twitter accounts, one for personal comments and research (@targuman), and the other for his role as dean (@shcdean).

@targuman: Modern catechism? “Wireless as a common good.”	@shcdean: If you are an SHC student or alumnus in the DC area this summer can you let me know? I would like to get a dinner together in mid June.
@targuman:David Letterman is the best and most underrated interviewer on TV. Interviewing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.	@shcdean: I want to assure you all that the new, gorgeous softball stadium Beard Field is named after a wonderful PSU supporter and not my chin hairs.
@targuman:Currently listening to the gutters finally being repaired (fell off in January!). Every clunk and thud makes me think $$.	@shcdean: Students: assuming funding, why wouldn’t you want to study abroad for a full year? Admits are telling me you are afraid to disconnect.

…

‘It’s Not Schizophrenic’

Christian Brady, an associate professor of classics and ancient Mediterranean studies and Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University, has split his social-media identity, as Ms. Feal does. “It’s not schizophrenic and it’s not to hide anything,” he said. Both of his Twitter feeds are public, and he expects that someone who searches for his name on Google will quickly find both his personal feed, @targuman, and the one he uses for his role as dean of the university’s Schreyer Honors College, @shcdean.

Deciding which account to post to is a matter of considering his audience, he says. Those looking to hear from the honors-college dean may have no interest in his research into Targums (ancient Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible), or in his collection of comic books. “I wouldn’t call them multiple identities, but views or perspectives on yourself,” is how he puts it.

Though Facebook was born only a few years ago, Mr. Brady says scholars have long made adjustments in their public personae: “If you’re writing an op-ed piece for the local newspaper, you’re going to use a different tone than if you’re writing for a journal in your discipline.”

Don’t Be Creepy

Some professors use only one Facebook page but wrestle with how open to make that information. One of the most-discussed questions about social networking on campuses is whether or not professors should “friend” their students on Facebook. Mr. Brady’s policy on the issue is one I’ve heard from many professors: He will accept a friend request from any student, but he never makes the first move. “I think it’s a little creepy when the old guy asks his students, Will you be my friend?,” he told me.

Read the rest of the article on the Chronicle of Higher Education

 

From where I sit, all religions are “mutant” in some way, shape or form in that people use religion to satisfy their personal needs. Since just about every person puts his or her individual take on God, then it follows that every person’s version of Christianity or Catholicism or Islam, Judaism and Buddhism is slightly different from everyone else’s.

…I bow to [Dean's] expertise as a minister and to Princeton Theological Seminary, but a lifetime of experience has proven to me that there is no one view of any theology

What Erbe should realize while prostrate before Dean and PTS is that variance and dissent within an order does not mean the absence of order. That is to say (and this is commonplace to most readers of this blog), there can be much debate and even division within a Calvinist community while they still adhere to a core theology. Our good friend Jim would call this dilettantism of the worst sort.

So while Erbe hopes that our successors will “pull away from religion for good” she offers us instead psychotherapy. Good luck with that.

 

As I sit with my cuppa tea this morning and read the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed a few stories caught my eye.

• Sartorial Study Suggests Professors Should Wear What They Want (subscriber link, this is a free link for 5 days)- A psychology instructor at North Hennipin Community College came to this conclusion after a brief study with four sections of a class. The study clearly has its limits and as the scholar points out, context is everything.

“I work at a college where professors wear a variety of things,” she says, “Some wear suits and ties and others wear shorts, so regardless of which class I was dressing for, I didn’t really stand out.”

That would not be true at every institution, Ms. Konheim-Kalkstein observes. “My husband is going to start teaching at West Point,” she says. “If he showed up in sneakers, I think he would have a much stronger reaction there from his students.”

• Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship by Christina Hoff Sommers – This one is charged and no doubt is raising lots of comments on the interwebs. Basically Sommers, who has criticized feminist scholarship before, is pointing out that there are many “facts” put forward in the feminist canon that simply aren’t true. I paid particular attention because at a recent workshop we had here we too were told that “20 to 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence.” Not true apparently. The CDC reports that it was 0.02% in 2003 and 0.01% in 2005. That is not just statistical error. Sommers is not anti-feminist however. She simply wants to see good scholarship.

All books have mistakes, so why pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank.

… False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women’s movement.

• The Evidence on Online Education – A new meta-analysis by the Department of Education suggests that online learning has distinct advantages over face-face instruction. Its findings were inconclusive for elementary and secondary ed, they said, but consistently positive in higher ed.

Notably, the report attributes much of the success in learning online (blended or entirely) not to technology but to time. “Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning,” the report says.

The note above in the IHE summary pointed to something that I have been wrestling with in terms of online education. The question has come up as to whether or not an honors course could be offered online. My instinct is to say “no” but I am not so sure. One of the key elements to an honors seminar is discussion and I have often found in my online courses (I have taught Intro to Hebrew Bible online many times) that because students are required to post to the online discussion board where they have to compose a message the discussion is often more thoughtful and everyone has a chance to be heard. Still mulling on this….

Finally, the Chronicle has “What They’re Reading on College Campuses.” No real surprises here. I had thought about #2 for our college’s summer reading project: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

 

From: Artificial Owl.

The Mexican church buried by lava : San Juan Parangaricutiro

This church is the only remaining building left from the village of San Juan Parangaricutiro, located in the state of Michoacán in Mexico. What happened? Not far from there In 1943 the Volcán de Parícutin started to rise out of a farmer’s cornfield. In the following irruption [sic], it buried 2 villages under lava and ashes, including San Juan Parangaricutiro.

This is an amazing site, by the way, offering “the most fascinating abandoned man-made creations.” They aren’t kidding. See this story about the Aral Sea drying up and leaving dozens of rusting hulks of Soviet-era ships in what is now a desert.

 

Wright’s view is not nearly as provocative as Time would have us believe. It is also not that new. Of course Wright is correct that most Christians do have a very different view of what happens after death and before the final resurrection than that held by early Judaism and the New Testament. But I am not sure that I buy Wright’s argument of soul sleep either.

Soul sleep is the notion that after death Christians go into a sort of stasis, until the final resurrection and the day of judgment. Wright doesn’t use this term, but it is the one that I first heard my father use when I was in high school and we were discussing these matters. Wright described it this way in the article,

TIME: Is there anything more in the Bible about the period between death and the resurrection of the dead?
Wright: We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text from about the same time as Jesus, says “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,” and that seems like a poetic way to put the Christian understanding, as well.

Wright’s view certainly does fit the New Testament evidence better than other readings, but I want to suggest a slightly different view. WARNING: this is all just a theory, feel free to rip it apart, and I do not suggest that it is doctrine in any way. That being said, I do not see how it is heretical or out of keeping with New Testament teachings or conceptions of early Judaism.

If we assume that God is outside of the space/time continuum then why must we continue to think of the life after death is in a linear progress? Could it not be that when one dies one is also outside of this linear path and thus, regardless of one’s point in history, all arrive at the same moment? Christ’s return then is not “delayed” but is always in the future and always at this moment. Perhaps a graphic can illustrate this better than my words.

Removing the limitations of the linear passage of time opens up other possibilities. It also makes the passage of time less daunting when considering Christ’s return. (Has it troubled any other Christians out there that Jesus was closer in history to David than to us? Brings to mind Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker trilogy and the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.) Still, I don’t think this conception is heretical and in fact accommodates NT teachings as well.

So what do you think?

 

At least in my view, but not in Barna’s or Jim West’s. In Jim’s post he cites the Barna survey that found that evangelicals are more concerned with abortion, and homosexual activity that with poverty or HIV/AIDS, at least compared with “the general population.” Jim then considers Tony Cartledge’s objections to the study:

As Tony Cartledge astutely observes,

Over the past few years, however, the term “evangelical” has also been co-opted and used as a descriptor for the politically conservative religious right, or as another euphemism for “fundamentalist.”

And he concludes

The end result is that “evangelical,” at least in Barna’s useage, has now gone the way of “conservative.” While both terms once described Christians who trust God, trust the Bible, and believe in the importance of sharing their faith, they are now applied to a very narrow band of believers who could accurately be called “fundamentalists” — but don’t want to be.

They might not want to be- but they are.

And thus ends Jim’s post. Here is where I want to pick up my comments (which were going to be posted on his site, but as I wrote I realized it merited a full post).
Jim’s final “They might not want to be- but they are” is a non sequitur. It does not follow because Barna defines what an evangelical is rather than people who identify themselves as evangelicals defining the term.

Note that Barna surveys do not classify a person based upon a respondent’s use of the terms “born again” or “evangelical,” instead basing the classification on what a person believes about spiritual matters.

There are many, many who would define themselves as evangelicals who do not fit Barna’s definition. By defining the term and then saying, “here is what evangelicals believe” Barna is engaging in circular reasoning.
To offer it in full, here is Barna’s definition of an evangelical.

“Evangelicals” meet the born again criteria (described above) plus seven other conditions. Those include saying their faith is very important in their life today; believing they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; believing that Satan exists; believing that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works; believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; asserting that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today. Being classified as an evangelical is not dependent upon church attendance or the denominational affiliation of the church attended. Respondents were not asked to describe themselves as “evangelical.”

It is not a bad definition per se, although I still think the procedure of defining individuals for themselves is suspect, but it contains a variety of elements that I certainly wouldn’t think is necessary for one to consider oneself as an evangelical. (Here’s a test, would Jim Wallis see himself in the definition above?) Two criteria that I, as one who would or at least used to describe myself as an evangelical, would not consider relevant to such a definition.

So far from evangelicals being fundamentalists all that this shows it that surveys are of necessity incomplete at portraying beliefs (other than the beliefs of the surveyor, in which case they are often quite revelatory). A far better and more useful survey, at least in terms of understanding what evangelicals believe, would be to survey self-defined evangelicals. But that would hardly bolster preconceived conceptions and is unlikely to happen.

 

Let the fun commence:

Yanking (the Chains of) the Ivies – Chronicle.com

By THOMAS BARTLETT

It’s easy to hate the Ivy League. Also, it’s fun.

Yet rarely do hundreds of people cheer wildly as some crazy-haired guy calls for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to be shut down. That’s right: closed entirely. Their campuses turned into luxury condos. Their students distributed evenly throughout the colleges of the Big Ten. Their endowments donated to charity, or used to purchase Canada.

As a graduate of an Ivy and an employee of a Big 10 school, both near Canada, I have to say that I am sympathetic. And the following comments also ring true to my ear.

But more interesting than the debate itself was the audience reaction. Anti-Ivy proclamations were greeted with enthusiastic whoops. It was as if everyone had finally been given permission to voice their long-held antipathy toward the elite. It was a mob scene, or as close as you’re likely to get at a wine-and-cheese gathering on the Upper West Side.

It’s all part of a current Ivy backlash, according to Alexandra Robbins, author of The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids and Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. Ms. Robbins thinks the mystique of the Ivy League is starting to wear thin — even though, as she acknowledges, it’s harder than ever to get into those colleges. “Other schools have caught up and surpassed the Ivy League,” she says.

And here is the kicker (and the opposite of what I experience quite often, I must say):

Ms. Robbins, a Yale graduate herself, is sometimes sheepish about her pedigree, preferring to avoid the topic.

Jim Newell knows the feeling. He writes for IvyGate, a snarky Ivy League gossip blog. Mr. Newell attended the University of Pennsylvania, “one of the lesser Ivies” (his words). His alma mater often gets confused with Penn State, and he’d rather not correct people: “God forbid I’d say, ‘That’s the one in the Ivy League.’ I’d rather run away than say that.”

 

Biblical Studies Carnival XXII

Via SansBlogue.

 

Thy word is all, if we could but spell.
George Herbert (1593-1633)

The entire commentary is quite good, and since it is available online, I encourage you to read it here (or subscribe to the podcast).