Today, I begin a new series of thoughts on the university experience, drawing from some memories of my undergrad years, and eschewing some thoughts on how the system may have affected me/my generation.

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University students are a peculiar bunch. They take pride in such things as remembering in detail every single thing they drank last Friday, even if they can’t remember where they were or who they slept with. They also prone to brag about living in a residence that was rated seventh on David Letterman’s list of ten dorms where it’s easiest to get laid. Getting laid is a big deal at college. Drinking is, too. Class? Not so much. College is like Disneyland for naïve, ‘energetic’ eighteen year olds. Some say it’s a place where education happens. This may be true of fourth year, but until then, most kids are too busy having fun. The university doesn’t care. It just offers some semblance of order while it milks them for every dollar it can. It is a business if nothing else.

The university is strange because it offers a range of classes that have very little bearing on real life and offer very little in the way of continuity. So in first year, you might take a class on French Linguistics, Psychology, the History of Totalitarianism in the twentieth century, Ancient Philosophy, and, just for fun, Geology. The classes you take are so random, and so different from each other, that the information you pick up is like a collection of fragments, like “cards to be played at final-exam time and then forgotten when a new hand (is) dealt.”

It’s very hard to form a picture that coheres everything you’ve learned. Fortunately, remembering and really learning isn’t the point. Getting a paper that says you did––that’s the point. Hence, most students do the bare minimum to get by in the classroom, and spend their mental effort figuring out how to make a bong out of 2L pop bottle and date people who are more attractive than them. I suppose there is a place for this kind of learning in life.

The format of learning in university is not all that different from high school. Coherence has been forsaken, and its once proud hull now sinks listlessly under the frothing wake of a ship driven by post-modern philosophy, the hermeneutic of suspicion and the financial bottom line. The trouble with forsaking coherence, with turning a curriculum into a “meaningless hodgepodge of subjects” , is that it abandons “a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person,” as Neil Postman says. The university does not have one of these, at least as far as I can tell. The closest thing to their ideal is “a person with no commitment and no point of view, but with plenty of marketable skills.” This is what society wants, so this is what the university is churning out, like sausages in a meat grinder.

In my experience, at university, knowledge was treated like a commodity. It was reduced to information and methods for success. We go to class to write down this information, so that later, when we get a job, we can use it. It is purely functional––not meant to be enjoyed in itself, or have any higher purpose than helping one get ahead. Due to this mindset, students adopt a consumerist mindset in the classroom––we are here for the exchange of knowledge. And we are the customers. And the customer is always right. Hence, the patient, diligent hard work that once accompanied a university education has all but evaporated. Thanks to SparkNotes and essay services, education has also surrendered to the only absolutes left standing: efficiency and market demand.

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I wrote this last summer one day, and rediscovered it just now. and it might be the best thing I’ve ever written.

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I am sitting on a park bench by the beach in a very expensive neighborhood of Vancouver. A dog that looks like the muppet spawn of Jim Henson runs past me at full speed, stops hard in his tracks, and takes a dump twelve feet to my right. If this animal had been a deer, or maybe a pig or something, I’m sure I would have quickly fumbled for my camera phone and snapped its picture to commemorate the occasion, because animals are funny. Their mannerisms are funny. The happiness and contentment they take in simply leaving the house is funny. The way they take a dump in public and then keep on moving like nothing happened is funny. They remind us that there is more to our world than the activity of humans.

I like to people watch. Not because I’m interested in what’s going on in people’s lives, or like to imagine I’m this person or that, but because I think humans are funny. We just don’t know it. We go around walking our dogs, buying ice cream, playing volleyball shirtless, never the wiser that there is much more going on around us than we’re apt to notice. Just like the dog doesn’t notice I’m watching him, we don’t notice we are being watched too. Maybe by someone else. Maybe by something else.

This is why I don’t trust people who say they’re agnostic: people who don’t believe in God, or mystery, or aliens, or something else in the universe. It’s like in Lord of the Rings. We live in something like the Shire. We have our own little world, with our own little problems and our own little activities, perfectly content to live in our own little bubble the rest of our lives. When someone comes bearing tales of a larger world, a darker world, that may someday intrude on our comforts, step on our flowers so to speak. But this is the way of the universe. Ask the Native Americans if blind ignorance worked out for them. There is something greater going on in our universe, and one day, it will intrude and disturb the piece of our little Shire. If it hasn’t already.

People like Richard Dawkins don’t understand religious people, because they think belief is all in their heads. “Trust the facts. Trust science” they might say. But the facts might tell me that there is a dog that looks like a muppet in front of me, and he evolved from a certain species of dog, and he is traveling at 6 miles an hour. But none of these facts answer the real question. Why is he here? Why does he look like that?

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So I met an atheist in September who is a comedian. I subscribed to his twitter, and then to the twitter of some of his friends, and now everyday I read things like this in my twitter feed:

“If the God of the Old Testament were to reappear today, it would be like a disaster movie.” or “Nothing gets people more infuriated than having to defend one of their bogus beliefs.”

Today, I will offer a short defense.
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We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming (namely, making Christian versions of internet sensations) with this, because, well, its an internet/regular media sensation that’s already Christian.

His name is Tim Tebow.

You may or may not be familiar with this (considering most of my readership is in Canada), but recently, there’s been a bit of an unusual story in the NFL.
Many NFL players pray in groups before games, or thank God after a touchdown, but few are as vocal about their faith as Bronco’s QB Tim Tebow. And it seems God is listening, because the Broncos (against all odds) are winning: Tebow is the first QB in NFL history to engineer six fourth-quarter comebacks in his first 11 starts.
And if you watched Sunday’s game vs the Bears, where everything seemed to go right in the end for the Bronco’s to win, you know that something is amiss. God, it seems, is on the Denver payroll: because the Bronco’s are winning, it seems in SPITE of Tebow.
For, as Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sun says, Tebow just isn’t very good:

“Face it: his long, rear-back-and-heave-it windup alone was ridiculous, and every second ball came out wobbling like a dying quail, and for long stretches of any given game, he couldn’t hit a receiver, travelling at whatever speed, 15 yards downfield. And worse, he brought the full kneeling, praying, thank-my-lord-and-saviour routine with him and kept waving his devout evangelical Christian faith in everyone’s face, ad nauseam…. Seen through that lens, everything that’s happened since Oct. 23 is some kind of cosmic — by which we do not mean heaven-sent — joke.

Is it a joke? Is God really at work? Or is it just dumb luck/will to win?

Frank Bruni of the New York Times comments that

The Broncos are the talk of the league. More and more people are watching. And you could indeed say they’re tuning in to find out how far God can take a team. Because that’s just another way of saying how far grit can.”

Huh, I thought. That’s interesting. God and Grit. Might make for a good biography title. I think the way we understand how God works (like, in terms of miracles) is in need of a tune up.

I like what my old(ish) prof John Stackhouse says: “God normally works through the normal.”

Many of us wish God would just show up and put everything back together in this world, and then accuse him of being either mean or non-existant if he doesn’t seem to show up. But really, it’s OUR world. He put us in charge. Shouldn’t we have some responsibility in its upkeep?
That, however, takes work. Hard, joyless work, like the kind God prescribed for Adam when he was ejected from the game in Eden.

I was talking about this with a friend recently, and he said something along the lines of “we can’t do it on our own strength–only God’s.”

I think that we only truly SEE God’s strength, however, when we have exhausted–truly, exhausted–our own strength. Maybe God then honors our commitment and gives us a little push, because, as evidenced by the Bronco’s, maybe the universe or God or whatever just honors those who put in the work.
And maybe those that believe that good will win in the end, that God is faithful and just to reward those who sacrifice for his sake, are willing to work just that little bit harder.

I think we can all learn something from Tebow, who, though he may lack in talent, seems to make up for it in work ethic. We can learn to believe that the little guy can win. That sometimes, things will turn out if you stick to your guns and work hard. You don’t have to be the most talented to win.
You just need to persevere, and trust that God is right there, working with you.

So what’s your say? I don’t personally believe God is doing a miracle with the Broncos (not that he can’t!). But perhaps that the Bronco’s success is partly due to the optimism and attitude they are now infected with, thanks to their newfound star’s outspoken faith. Maybe that applies whether you’re working on the football field or a supermarket. Maybe that’s just how the universe was designed to work.

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So we started our series yesterday on “Why Young Christians Lose Interest in God” to find that the problem isn’t really orthodoxy or anything, it’s just that the internet is more interesting than church. So We uncovered the most popular things on the internet, and are now in the process of “copying culture for Christ” like we learned to do from the evangelical culture of the 80′s and 90′s.
Yesterday was Rebecca Black. Today is FirstWorldProblems.
If you haven’t seen, this was a huge meme (ie internet sensation) this past year. They included pictures of people looking anguished, saying things like “I was not served Indian food on my flight to India” or “I have to take the stairs every day in my condo instead of using the elevator in order to avoid making small talk with the front-desk attendant.”
more after the jump:

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So last night I had a little party in my home town to celebrate the launch of my book on Kindle (which you can also read on ipads, iphones, and computers! if you get the free kindle app). A great time was had by all!

I gave a talk called ‘On Music: Living Like A Rockstar (without the cocaine)” that will be up on youtube very soon so look out for that.

Thanks to all who came out!

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