Wheaton conference

Most of this week -- monday through yesterday -- I spent at the Scripture and the Disciplines conference at Wheaton College in Illinois. It was sponsored by the Wheaton College Faith and Learning Program, the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Center for Theological Understanding, and the Christian College Consortium. I attended with four of my colleagues and one of our alumni.

According to the mission statement, "This conference provides the venue for Christian scholars in the humanities and social sciences together with their colleagues in Biblical and Theological Studies to explore new avenues for scholarship deeply rooted in Scripture." There were a number of plenary sessions as well as discipline-specific sections meeting separately. Among the plenary speakers were Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey (formerly of the University of Ottawa and now of Baylor University), Mark Noll and Alvin Plantinga. My colleagues, Al Wolters and Craig Bartholomew, played an active role in the discipline-specific sections.

These sections included biblical and theological studies, economics, English, history, political science, psychology and sociology. The three political science sessions were organized by James W. Skillen of the Center for Public Justice. Readers will not be surprised to hear that I found these the most worthwhile part of the conference. I was pleased to learn from Skillen that he will shortly be publishing two books, In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-Democratic Explorations and With or Against the World? America's Role Among the Nations. Fans of Skillen's writings will look forward to reading these.

Alvin Plantinga I have known since my graduate student days at Notre Dame some two decades ago. We were members of the same church congregation in South Bend, Indiana. I was amazed to learn from him that he travelled to Iran two years ago, where he delivered a series of lectures on christian philosophy, in which there is apparently considerable interest in an almost wholly muslim country. As he explained it, Iranians tend to believe that all western philosophers are atheists along the lines of Bertrand Russell; they are thus fascinated by the notion that there might be philosophers who believe in God.

As I grew up in Wheaton, I was happy to do a considerable amount of walking around the town, revisiting some of the places of my childhood and youth. I found two used book stores near the college campus. I also walked downtown where I visited a locally famous popcorn shop operating out of a store wedged in an alley way between two buildings. The secret recipe has been a local favourite for decades. I also walked two blocks of the Illinois Prairie Path, on which I had bicycled virtually every day during summers while a student.

All in all, it was a worthwhile trip.