Month: December 2012

My Teaching Ministry–Part IV

  

After the Lord turned my heart around again, I sought to teach fulltime at a Christian university. During my adjunct stint at Regent—the same time the Lord spoke to me while driving the car (see last Friday’s post)—one of my students informed me that there was an opening for a history professor at the university where he had just received his undergraduate degree. Since he was impressed with my teaching, he opened the door by contacting the department chair. I… Read more »

Lewis: Screwtape on Middle Age

  

One of the books that catapulted C. S. Lewis to worldwide fame was The Screwtape Letters, published in the early 1940s. It was a fanciful interpretation of how a senior devil—Screwtape—gives advice to a junior devil—Wormwood–on how to lead people into sin and ensure they never enter into a relationship with God. Here’s part of that “advice”: The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is so hard for these… Read more »

My Teaching Ministry–Part III

  

All sin is rebellion against God’s righteous and reasonable commands. All sin is foolish. I became a rebel and a fool at a time in my life when I had many blessings from the Lord. As I noted in my last two posts, He had given me the headmastership of a Christian school and had shown me a Biblical way of educating. Yet I decided to be a fool just when He was giving my life its real meaning. Too… Read more »

My Teaching Ministry–Part II

  

Yesterday, I wrote about how I, much to my amazement, found myself becoming a teacher. As headmaster of a new Christian school in the late 1970s, I had both administrative and teaching responsibilities. I found out, though, that I had a lot to learn about real education. We started that first year with a prepackaged program called Accelerated Christian Education (ACE). It made education “easy.” Students sat in their cubicles and filled out workbooks. They would then take exams at… Read more »

My Teaching Ministry–Part I

  

I didn’t want to teach. Public speaking always created a knot in my stomach, so to make that my everyday experience wasn’t attractive. I remember, as a freshman in high school, trying out for the school play only because my friends did. The shock was that they didn’t receive a part, whereas I got a high-profile one. I thought I would be sick and seriously considered bailing out. Yet I survived and did quite well. I went on to “star”… Read more »

Book Review: 1861

  

I read a lot. I mean, a whole lot. That’s what historians do. Sometimes, the books pile up on me and I have a hard time staying up with them. My resolve to get through the ones I already have before buying another one always weakens when I stumble across one that seems to stand out, particularly when it might be a candidate for a text in one of my upper-level courses. That’s how I came to purchase and read… Read more »

The Quotable Lewis

  

Over Thanksgiving, I was browsing through a Barnes and Noble in Tucson when I came across a volume I didn’t know existed—a massive compilation of C.S. Lewis’s most memorable quotes. Since Lewis is one of my all-time favorite writers, I was delighted with my find. As I’ve begun to plumb its depths, I’ve been renewed in my appreciation of the insights he offers. Normally, I’ve rested from this blog on Saturdays, but with the addition of this book to my… Read more »