In the traditional breakout sessions, small groups of students are encouraged to engage in thoughtful discussion about many different issues of faith and academics. Breakout session leaders introduce topics and provide the background necessary to inform the discussion. Participants will have the option of attending two of these breakout sessions during the conference.
“Here I am”: Responding to God’s Call Upon Your Career - Rick Bates
Each of us has an intrinsic vocational design that seeks expression through our work. God endowed you with a unique combination of gifts: interests, talents, skills, and personality traits. And, by God’s design, you were created to fulfill a divinely appointed purpose with your life. This discussion-based session will explore ways to maximize the synergies between ministry, work and spiritual gifts. This session will explore some of these themes through the lens of Rick's own personal experience as a horticulturist.
Rick Bates is a professor of horticulture and has served in Penn State’s Department of Horticulture since 2000. He received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech, and his B.S. and M.S. from West Virginia University. Rick’s responsibilities include developing research and education programs for the horticulture industry. He has also worked on agriculture development projects in Ukraine, Serbia, Russia, Georgia, Mexico and Myanmar. He is passionate about using horticulture as a tool to alleviate poverty and regularly works with orphanages in Myanmar.
Reading As a Spiritual Discipline and Practice of Discipleship - Byron Borger
Great leaders, thoughtful saints and serious followers of Christ have all reminded us that learning, studying, and reading is a vital part of Christian discipleship. Learning to be passionate about books, engaged with ideas, and reading widely will be discussed, even as participants will be invited to share how their lives have been enriched by books, authors, reading and learning. This is your opportunity to join in the discussion with our conference bookseller.
Byron Borger owns, along with his wife, the Hearts & Minds bookstore in Dallastown, PA which they've run for 27 years. Before opening their independent book and music store they worked in campus ministry for the CCO, and lived for a bit in inner city Pittsburgh. They are active in a Presbyterian church in York, PA and have three children, ages 27, 22, and 16. Byron enjoys being involved in conversations about how the Christian faith influences public life, hearing how people relate their faith to their work, citizenship and leisure. He blogs regularly about books at Hearts and Minds Booknotes
Mommy Phd, How Mothers Can Chart Their Own Academic Path - Stephanie Butler Velegol
In this session we will explore the role of women of faith who choose to have children and work in an academic setting. In some cases having a family and being an academic can seem mutually exclusive. God gives women passions and abilities (not to mention years of schooling) so that they can change the world outside of their families. And yet these same women often desire to stay home and care for their children and their home. You have heard it said “Women can do it all…just not at the same time.” There is no one size fits all solution to this. SO, whether you are a mom or thinking of becoming a mom at some point in your life, this session will give you a chance to explore how you can step out in faith so that you can do what God has called you to do in your career and your family.
Stephanie Velegol received her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon in 2000. Since then she has worked as a post doc at Penn State, taught courses at Penn State and Bucknell University and birthed 2 daughters (age 4 and 6) – not all at the same time. She is currently teaching 1 course per semester in Environmental Engineering in the Civil Engineering department at Penn State. Just recently she began to do research and write proposals to create a locally sustainable water treatment process for those in underdeveloped countries. She has recently written an article about her academic journey.
Image and Identity in Creation and Resurrection: Image of God and our Social Image - Suresh Canagarajah
We live in the age of makeovers. People in this culture believe that we can reconstruct our identity at will. Image is everything. Whether being elected as the President or getting a part-time job, we believe that all that matters is projecting the appropriate image to succeed. This attitude is bolstered by the postmodern orientation to identity as splintered, fluid, and constructed. Genesis 1:26 identifies human beings as made ‘after the image of God’; 1 Cor 15:49 assures believers, ‘Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.’ What does it mean to be image-bearers in a postmodern world where splintered, relative, performed identities are posited as the norm?
Suresh Canagarajah is from the Tamil-speaking community in war-torn Sri Lanka. He is the Kirby Professor in Language Learning and Director of the Migration Studies Project at Pennsylvania State University. He teaches courses on World Englishes, Postcolonial Literature, and Theories of Rhetoric and Composition in the departments of English and Applied Linguistics. He has taught before in the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and the City University of New York (Baruch College and the Graduate Center). His book Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (OUP, 1999) won Modern Language Association’s Mina Shaughnessy Award for the best research publication on the teaching of language and literacy. His subsequent publication Geopolitics of Academic Writing (UPittsburgh Press 2002) won the Gary Olson Award for the best book in social and rhetorical theory. He is currently analyzing interview transcripts and survey data from South Asian immigrants in Canada, USA, and UK to consider questions of identity, community, and heritage languages in diaspora communities.He is the 2009 recipient of the Henry Osborne award for "academic excellence with Christian commitment" from Cornerstone University, Michigan.
Writing Christian/Christian Writing? Bearing the Image of God in a Secular World - Kimi Cunningham Grant
What is Christian writing? What does it mean to write Christian? As a writer, can I be unashamedly Christian without alienating secular readers or even sophisticated Christians? And conversely, can I be a writer whose work isn’t overtly Christian? This session will explore questions of what it means to use our God-given gifts to create and contribute in a secular world.
Kimi Cunningham Grant writes poetry and nonfiction. She is a 2009 recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in creative nonfiction, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, RATTLE, Apalachee Review, Whitefish Review, Poet Lore, and Eighteenth-Century Women. Currently, she lives in central Pennsylvania with her husband and yellow lab, and she teaches English at Penn State.
Speaking the Truth (In Love) - Ben Henderson
Words shape our world, representing and guiding what we believe, feel, and do. The Bible makes it clear that our speech can have great power to bring heaven's reality to earth. (Proverbs 18:21, Job 22:28 (NKJ or NASB), James 3:5-12) So in the academic and social conversations that occur in our world, what authority does—and should—our words have? In what ways can our words be used to speak truth and blessing to those around us? How can the Truth be spoken in love, even when people don’t seem receptive to what we’re saying? How do our words still hold power to bring life in these situations? During the session we’ll discuss both the biblical understanding of words and speech, as well as how we can practically apply this understanding of language to everyday life.
Ben Henderson is a lecturer in Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. He received his B.S. from Willamette University and his M.A. from Penn State. Ben taught communication courses for several years before joining the Penn State faculty full-time in 2005. His research interests include transformational leadership, the role of religion in American public discourse, the rhetorical tension between the universality and particularity of truth within orthodox Christianity, and the power of language to create both division and community. Ben’s other interests include backpacking, making music, cooking, and raising unusual pets.
Innovation for Redemption: New Ideas for Making All Things New - Steve Lutz
Through stories and brainstorming, we will explore how your innovative ideas (in any field) can transform the world. If you have an idea for an invention, a new business, a new approach, or anything that can impact the world in a positive way, bring it! We will be interacting with these ideas.
Steve Lutz is a campus minister at Penn State with CCO, as well as the founder of Commontary, a nonprofit that seeks to equip people with free biblical resources around the world. He lives with his wife and 2 boys in Boalsburg.
Mathematics and the Image of God - John Roe (AM)
Is mathematics - so rational, so unemotional, so pure - as close as we can get to thinking God's thoughts after Him? Generations of Christian thinkers, by locating the "image of God" specifically in human *rationality*, have implicitly affirmed this. In this discussion we will explore whether 'rationality' is an adequate account of the 'imago Dei', and we'll seek a more holistic understanding of how doing mathematics can become an act of worship.
Math, Modeling and Management: The Case of Climate Change - John Roe (PM)
How is it possible to model the global climate when we can’t even forecast the weather? What is the ethical standing of the modeler as s/he contributes to public discussion and policy making? Where does “expertise” stop and citizenship begin, or is that the wrong question? What does it mean for us as believers, in our relation to creation, if we come to see the entire global environment as a system whose interrelations are within our conceptual grasp? Are we called to be “managers” of that system? We will try to explore these questions through study of the enterprise of “global circulation modeling” in the light of relevant scriptural passages.
John Roe is a professor and head of Penn State's mathematics department. Born in England in 1959, he taught for many years at Oxford University before moving with his wife Liane to State College in 1998. His passions include mathematics, cooking, rock-climbing, and playing the guitar. He and Liane worship at Calvary's Gray's Woods gathering.
Scuttling the Schizophrenic Student Mind: On Teaching the Unity of Faith and Learning in Psychology - Mary Stuart Van Leeuwen
What do we mean by a Christian world view, and how (if at all) does it apply to academic and applied psychology? Are psychology and Christian world view like oil and water, which need to be shaken (or 'integrated') together, or does psychology already have a competing world view (or world views) that need to be critically addressed by Christians? Using examples from both academic and applied psychology, Prof. Van Leeuwen will argue for the importance of being
worldview-sensitive as we study psychology, AND learning how to use a Christian worldview encompassing creation, fall, redemption and future hope to make the study of psychology less frustrating and more coherent.
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (Ph.D. Northwestern University) is a social and cross-cultural psychologist, and chair of the psychology department at Eastern University, St. Davids PA. Her research interests also include history of psychology, philosophy of science and social science, and the psychology of gender. Her previous books include The Person in Psychology, Gender and Grace, and My Brother's Keeper. Her most recent book (to be published Feb. of 2010 by Brazos Press) is A Sword Between the Sexes: C.S. Lewis and the Gender Debates. She is married to Raymond Van Leeuwen (Ph.D., University of Toronto), who is an Old Testament professor at Eastern University. They have two adult sons and one grandchild.
Richly Connected: Living Next Door to Your Consumer - Sam Van Eman
Jobs exist in relationship. Lawyers have clients, teachers have students, researchers have subjects. What if we put the second greatest commandment to the test by imagining these relationships in a duplex – lawyer living on one side and client on the other, for instance? Sharing the same roof and walls would keep things personal, no? And one can't get away from the other at the end of the day. Decisions made at work would, therefore, affect the daily life of each at home.
Sam Van Eman was a public school teacher before joining the Coalition for Christian Outreach in 1998. As a staff specialist with the CCO, he develops wilderness leaders, writes about the intersection of faith and work, and speaks on pop culture advertising as both a critic and fan. In 2005, he wrote a book called On Earth as It is in Advertising? Moving From Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope. You can find him at High Calling Blogs or at his own blog, New Breed of Advertisers. Sam lives with his wife and two daughters in central Pennsylvania.
Living out Honor in the Workplace and Career - Tim Wainwright
Sorry, Tim Wainwright's session has been canceled for this year.
Eli taught statistics courses at Penn State for four years and is currently employed by Minitab (a statistical software company). For the last four years, Eli has been working toward an MA in Theological Studies at Bethel Seminary of the East. Eli and his wife Lauren (who is on staff at Calvary) have been married for three years and welcomed Evelyn Grace, their first child, into the world in June. Eli is a bit too competitive in games and sports but likes to play. He loves to read and to learn, and he likes to ponder and discuss the ways that faith in Christ should inform and be revealed to others in everyday life. Eli likes to explore new territory when possible, and the Redwood National Forest is his favorite spot on the planet.