After a busy and fruitful summer, I am excited for the new school year already underway. Click on the links to the left to view some of our upcoming forums. U Penn’s theme is “Reconciliation in a Divided World,” focusing on Darfur, terrorism, forgiveness, and healing. UC Davis, Arizona State, and Northern Arizona will all host new forums this fall.

Our summer projects included improvements to our planning resources, several of which will be unveiled throughout this semester. Be sure to check out our newly improved website and subscribe to our media site podcast for updates on our latest recordings!

Included in this newsletter is an excerpt from Mary Poplin’s talk at Pomona College last spring, entitled, “The Making of a Mind Set Against God: The Intellectual Principles I Was and Wasn’t Taught in College.” Read and listen to her intellectual and spiritual journey through college, grad school, and a career in the academy.

We are also pleased to share two new developments with you. First, in our growing effort to expand the impact of forums on individual lives and whole campuses, we are partnering with World Vision to make their “Acting on AIDS” program available as a follow-up opportunity for forums dealing with issues of social justice. Secondly, we are responding to invitations from visionary students and faculty in the Netherlands to support Veritas Forums planned for 2008. Read more about both of these below.

Once again, we are grateful for your support, planning, and prayers in creating forums for the exploration of true life. May the Lord bless the year ahead!

Gratefully yours,

Mary Poplin, professor of education at Claremont Graduate University, shared her own intellectual and spiritual story at Pomona College this spring. Poplin revealed how her education subtly (and not so subtly) undercut the validity of Christianity as a worldview. It promoted naturalism and secular humanism such that for much of her life she never entertained Christianity as a viable option. Only after becoming discouraged by the narrowness of every philosophy she studied, frustrated by every theory to generate effective solutions, and increasingly intellectually bored that she began to explore Christianity as a worldview. Poplin shares the principles she was taught, and shows how these principles contrast with those found in Christianity and lead to radically different results. The following excerpt is from, “The Making of a Mind Set Against God: The Intellectual Principles I Was and Wasn’t Taught in College.”

I want to tell you up front that this presentation is about how at age 41, already a senior tenured professor, I began to reconsider the worldviews to which I was committed and to investigate Christianity as a unique worldview, which I later found was filled with literally thousands of principles critical to understanding the sciences, the arts, the social sciences and the professional disciplines – all academic fields. I began to realize that of all the worldviews I have ever studied and taught, and there have been quite a few, the Judeo-Christian worldview is the most complete, total system for understanding ourselves, other people, institutions, nations and the natural and social world. To my understanding and experience it conforms most to reality and is the only worldview that I have found that is endless in its wisdom, which promises that I will never again be intellectually bored.

...Over the course of my education there were four things I gradually came to believe about God and Christianity. First, He either did not exist or if He did exist He was irrelevant to the intellectual life. Second, if God existed He was not really active in the world today or acted in ways that were, let us say, not very Godly according to worldly standards. Third, I came to believe that believing in Christ was sheer foolishness and even more incompatible with the life of the mind. And, fourth, I finally came also to believe that Christianity was the seat of oppression. In addition to these beliefs I fortified my reasoning against engaging Christianity at all. I had four major reasons for avoiding Christianity.

...By the time I graduated from college I had turned my back on Christianity and gradually through graduate school and my professorship I became hostile to it. I was hostile to Christianity but I did not know anything about it. This is very important for you to hear. I was a professor and I was hostile to Christianity, even overtly in class, but I did not know anything about it.

After Poplin became a Christian, she worked with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity to understand why they often said that their work was not social work, but religious work.

It was after my return that I had an intellectual crisis or awakening resulting from the realization that Christianity was a worldview, not just some narrow personal religious belief and that the Christian worldview had principles that could be engaged intellectually in virtually every field. I’m sure from the secular humanist stance Mother Teresa was just some co-dependent person working out her own “issues” on the poor. But that is far from the truth and I found many differences between their religious work and the social work phenomenon of which I had always been a part.

I could go on and on about intellectually engaging principles of Judeo-Christianity ­ about how the righteousness of a leader influences the righteousness of the people under him or her; about how the health and fruitfulness of the land is related to the righteousness of the people; principles about the operation of good and evil, psychology, economics, art, music, geography, history, literature, education, business, law, politics, mathematics, sociology, medicine, anthropology ­ there are no fields in which a scholar from that discipline could not find related principles in Judeo-Christian thought. And I am not suggesting here that all principles of secular knowledge are false, they are not; there are many that are true. But if Judeo-Christianity is true then there are many errors of omission and commission that distort the truth inside them.

Click here to listen to the full talk.

The most powerful part of a forum often happens after the lights go down and the speakers return home, when students have the opportunity to respond to new ideas they’ve encountered. Planners who engage participants in thoughtful follow-up make a lasting impact on their campuses, as they enable conversations that began at the forum to continue long after it has ended.

Veritas is delighted to introduce a promising new option for campus follow-up: World Vision’s Acting on AIDS. This creative partnership between World Vision and The Veritas Forum provides a way for students to continue integrating their knowledge with their lives, and connecting their hardest questions about injustice with the person and story of Jesus Christ.

Acting on AIDS is a grassroots movement of college students who seek to raise awareness and promote political advocacy on behalf of those affected by global AIDS and poverty. The goal is to organize a community of like-minded students who desire to put their faith into action in response to issues of social justice. Through Acting on AIDS, students on as many as 150 university campuses have found a way to take effective action on their campus and to promote a transformation of worldview.

If you are interested in learning more about Acting on AIDS, please visit their Web site at www.actingonaids.org. To receive a comprehensive packet of information about Acting on AIDS, including their free DVD toolkit, please e-mail actingonaids[at]worldvision.org or call 888.876.2004.

Last month Kelly and Dan visited Amsterdam for the release of the Dutch edition of Finding God Beyond Harvard. In conjunction with translating the book into Dutch, Christian leaders in Holland have caught the Veritas vision, and are gathering together to apply the Veritas model to the needs of Dutch university students. Dutch students, faculty and ministers are now planning to launch Veritas-Netherlands in the cities of Amsterdam, Leiden, and Delft in 2008.

Interested in reading Finding God Beyond Harvard in English? Click here for more information.