There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.
...he had also acquired a peculiar academic quirk. During exams, he knew all the answers but wasn’t able to successfully map his answers to the right questions. So as soon as an exam started, he simply started putting his answers in the order in which he remembered them. Every time he moved to a new class, his parents made the new teachers aware of this snag. The teachers acknowledged it and reassured the parents that they’d match his answers against the appropriate questions.
This strange new test called PISA, which stood for the Program for International Student Assessment. Instead of a typical test question, which might ask which combination of coins you needed to buy something, PISA asked you to design your own coins, right there in the test booklet.
If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.
New dreams are like new wines; they grow sweeter over time. With patience, you will be able to climb your spiritual, financial, academic, marital and social ladders in Jesus' name!
My priority is not about grades. I yearn for knowledge, skills and wisdom.
My priority is not about grades. I seek yearn for knowledge, skills and wisdom.
The claim at the heart of this book has been carefully researched by several generations of scholars and is orthodox in academic circles, if not beyond. Christians under the Roman Empire were neither constantly persecuted nor martyred in huge numbers for their faith. They were prosecuted from time to time for alleged sedition, holding illegal meetings or refusing to sacrifice to the emperor. They were, like other convicts, sometimes tortured and executed in horrible ways. They seem to have been regarded by many Romans with distaste as a particularly silly superstition. But Christian stories of thousands of individual and mass martyrdoms over centuries have at best a limited basis in historical fact, and in many cases are sheer fiction.
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
What is the difference between my view and the classical Christian perspective? I am convinced that there are not multiple comings and multiple returns of Christ, but only one decisive coming at the end of the world, which includes the resurrection, the rapture, and his appearance in the sky!
As students grow more and more accustomed to assuming materialism and naturalism in their academic work, the concept of creation by God gradually tends to become less real to them. It is not so much that any single finding undermines their faith; rather, the day-to-day practice of thinking in naturalistic terms about academic subjects makes it awkward to think differently when it comes to religion.
His name was Ed. His nickname was Scrambled Ed. On leaving school he had taken a year out to decide what he wanted to study at University. The year passed and he still hadn't decided but went to University anyway. 'Academic' is defined as 'of, or relating to, institutionalized education and scholarship'. The same word, at the same time, also means 'having little practical use or value, as by being overly detailed, unengaging or theoretical'. The latter definition seemed the most appropriate for Ed's university career which was a mash up of drinking, diving, surfing, kayaking and having his heart-broken. All washed down with a few pints. After three years of that he was awarded a second class joint honours degree which he put in the recycling bin and went in search of something that would make him feel better.
Most intellectual training focuses on analytical skills. Whether in literary criticism or scientific investigation, the academic mind is best at taking things apart. The complementary arts of integration are far less well developed. This problem is at the core of human ecology. As with any interdisciplinary pursuit, it is the bridging across disparate ways of knowing that is the constant challenge.