Exerpts from "Ideas Matter", Everett Piper Ph.D., Pres. of Oklahoma Wesleyan University

Humm...



"For years, I, along with most all of my peers in higher education assumed that the human deveolpment theory was simply and purely an empirical fact. We believed that students came to college with ... minds where everything was black and white, right or wrong. We claimed that these students came to us with authority as the basis of all moral judgement. If the pastor said it was true, it was true. If mom said it was right it was right. If dad said it was wrong it was wrong. Accordingly, we in the ivory tower believed it was our obligation to challenge these students to grow beyound the dualism of a Judeao-Christian ethic, take off the blinders, and embrace the multiple and various facets of "truth". Surely our young people needed to step away from the comforts of home and churches and become more nuanced and "mature" in their morality and in their thinking.

I no longer believe this. In his recnet book, Educating Post-Modern America, Generation X Goes to College, Peter Sax contends that one of the basic characteristics of today's college students (and perhaps culture as a whole) is the pervasive and oxymoronic belief in absolute relativism. Sax argues that opinions are all that matter in the classrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms of contemporary life. It isn't that everything is black and white, right or wrong, but to the contrary, today nothing is black or white and nothing is right or wrong. ..... To the contrary, personal opinion rather that objective standards has become the final measure of all truth. The relative value of any action or belief is the only basis for judgment. ...one value or another is simply a matter of personal choice and personal preference. It's all relative..."Who are we to judge...?"

...Is Peter Sax referring to young people other than those in our schools, our shurches, and our neighborhoods? Is this a critique of a culture elsewhere--somebody else's but not ours? All I know is this: ... (I) am awakened to the sobering limitations of prevailing academic fads. Human development theory has its place but it falls far short of providing the "liberal" environment and consequent learning that it claims as its highest good. You see, the word liberal implies liberation. And implicit in the word "liberation" is the presupposition that there are bad things from which we should be liberatied. It is not bad because we think so. It is bad simply because it is. The holocaust was evil not just in the minds of those who disagreed with it. It was explicitly and absolutely bad because it violated an immutable and transcendent moral standard. It was, is and always will be simply wrong to incinerate people in furnaces because you have more political power than they do. But here is the sobering reality-- our young people today (and I have had tons of them in under my tutelage) do not have the intellectual training and moral confidence to defend the logic of the previous several sentences.

Ideas matter. Ideas that disparage the time-tested truths of an earlier day while fawning over the newest intellectual fads may lead us down a very dangerous path..."

Food for thought!!!

Long time no read.... from me!!!

Did you think I'd left for good? I had a long post written the other day and I had to leave for an appointment...hit a wrong key and... you got it... it disappeared. It will be interesting if any of you are looking anymore... or have given up on me!!!

Lots has happened...to Lookout Mountain, GA to see Ryan and take Katie to Covenant... I love that college... because of the kids that go there!!! I've started speaking with Christian Women's Clubs... and will be speaking here on the 9th. I've gotten through a 5th Valentine's Day and anniversary (it would have been our 25th) without David, and I am currently in the throes of following and supporting Katie and Jonathan in debate tournaments...which I love!!! What else can a mother do? It's not always clean house, let me tell you!!! And it can drive me nuts!!!

And admidst all that...I'm also going to start practicing what I teach... slow down and sit before God... so I can hear Him. I have found myself so busy with so many things that I have not given to Him enough time for listening to Him. My goal is to start keeping 2 hours in the am for me... to study the Word and pray. I want to let Him open any closets that I might be hiding from Him... or even hiding from me. How we cleverly do that! We don't want to "go there"... we often have to wade through pain to get to the high ground of peace, or face our ugly flaws to achieve the beauty we so desire. Oh, if we only would realize the fullness of being His daughter or son...then we could see our beauty and value through the flaws and pain here on this earth. That closet wouldn't hold the "monsters" we don't want to see or slay. Indeed, we would face them squarely... with the one beside us that grants us protection and purpose, beauty and peace....

...and that is what I'm going to do. He loves me enough to make me whole!!! (Right, Ryan?) So, though my schedule seems clogged as ever...my closets are going to be hunted down... and cleaned.

I'd appreciate your prayers....