Thursday Thinking – Christian Higher Education

Earlier this year, New York Times columnist David Brooks recently delivered a speech in Washington, D.C. at an event celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Consortium of Christian Colleges and Universities. If you're interested in higher education and culture (as everybody should be), I recommend that you take the time to read it.

The Cultural Value of Christian Higher Education
Christian colleges can develop students in ways few other institutions can.

A Short Excerpt...
"Many of our institutions, and especially our universities, don’t do much to help our graduates achieve that transcendence. But for Christian universities and other religious institutions, this is bread and butter. This is the curriculum. This is the chapel service. This is the conversation students are having late at night. It’s lived out. Now, you in this room, have the Gospel. You have the example of Jesus Christ. You have the beatitudes; the fire of the Holy Spirit; you believe in a personal God who is still redeeming the world. As Pope Francis demonstrated, when a single person acts like Jesus, the whole world is transfixed. Carrying the Gospel is your central mission to your students and to those you serve beyond the campus walls, but that’s not all you have. You have a way of being that is not all about self. You have a counterculture to the excessive individualism of our age. You offer an ideal more fulfilling and more true and higher than the ideal of individual autonomy."