As some of you know, I teach in Messiah College’s first-year “CORE” class, “Created and Called for Community.” It is an interdisciplinary course that introduces our students to the mission of the college. We read the Bible, Alice Walker, Tolkien, Wang Anyi, Martin Luther King, Robert Putnam, Jerry Sittser, Henry Nouwen, John Paul II, Ernest Boyer, Albert Schweitzer, Gregory Wolfe, and Desmond Tutu, to name a few of the texts. (We need more classic history texts in this course!). The class is broken up into three units: Creation, Community, and Vocation.
At today’s CORE convocation our speaker was Scot McKnight, the Karl A. Olsson Professor of Religious Studies at North Park University in Chicago. McKnight is a well-known New Testament scholar who also writes popular books about Christian spirituality. But he is perhaps best known for his award-winning blog, “Jesus Creed.” Scot challenged our students to live lives that “love God” and “love others” and had some hilarious and moving stories from his travels and experiences as a teacher. He also had lunch with CORE faculty. We had a great discussion about various trends in Christian theology.
It was great to have Scot–a former teacher of mine–with us today.
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