Talking with students about spiritual things

Don’t know if this U.S. News & World Report article or not. It has some interesting quotes that might be useful to ministries that work with college students and professors. [Disclaimer: I served in ministry for 10 years to Christian Leadership Ministries, Campus Crusade for Christ’s ministry to university professors. I am biased!]

Some quotes. [Color emphasis is mine.]

Large majorities of undergraduates, for instance, say they seek meaning and purpose in their lives, yet just 8 percent report hearing professors discuss spiritual or religious issues in or out of the classroom, according to a major study of campus religious life by University of California-Los Angeles researchers. “There is a poor fit today between students’ interest in spiritual matters and the universities’ general lack of interest in those concerns,” says Alexander Astin, founder of UCLA’ s Higher Education Research Institute.

Riley found that these schools are providing intellectual heft to a generation of spiritual seekers that is already influencing American society, business, and government.

True, total enrollment in colleges with some kind of sectarian affiliation hasn’t grown as a percentage of total college enrollment during the past 20 years. But at schools with an intensively religious focus, she notes, student numbers have surged.

In doing so, they exemplify a form of profound intellectual diversity that is, paradoxically, often threatening to the self-described champions of that ideal on the majority of the nation’s campuses. “There is still pressure,” Marsden says, “to uphold the view that diversity trumps everything else, including the view that there may be absolutes.” Yet it’s precisely that devotion to absolutes that seems to account for the appeal of God on the Quad ‘s quietly thriving colleges.

It seems that college students are looking for respected influencers, like their professors, to be talk with them about spiritual things. They are looking for absolutes. The do see the shallowness of current tolerance and diversity. They will go to where they find intense discussions about spiritual matters.

This seriousness about serious issues is what led to the construction of a number of internet websites in the mid and late 1990’s. Leadership University, Español Leadership University, Origins, Stonewall Revisited, Academic Initiative, William Lane Craig Philosopher, Doug Yeo Bass Trombonist, Probe Ministries, and Loving Monday.

We believed (and still do) in the purpose statement, Telling the truth at the speed of life.