A New Semester

This post is a bit of personal reflection and sharing about my upcoming semester. I’m starting my 20th year of teaching at Eastern Kentucky University. There was some culture shock back in 2004, moving from Boulder, CO to Richmond, KY. It took a while to find a church home, to find friends, and to adjust to life in a part of the country very different from where we’d been and where we were from. Looking back, it is easy to see God’s hand in bringing us here. There have been ups and downs, of course, but at this point we can’t imagine leaving this town. We are committed to it, to our church, and to fulfilling our vocational calls here.

The fall semester is always full of energy and anxiety, as thousands of freshmen come to EKU and start their college lives. This semester, as is true in most, the majority of my students are freshmen. I teach a couple of sections of introduction to ethics, where we read about different views of the good life, with a special focus on character. I also teach Honors 101: The Examined Life every fall. This is the first class for our incoming Honors students. They are a joy to teach. They read, they are thoughtful, and are such interesting young people. I love our discussions. We read Plato, other views of the good life, and some literature related to this theme.

This fall I also get to teach a class I designed that is an upper-division seminar in the Honors program, “The Secular and Sacred in Modern Life.”

We’ll discuss issues related to religion, politics, suffering, and the many things that make up a good human life from a variety of secular and spiritual perspectives. I know most of the students already, having had them in 1-2 other Honors courses. We hit the ground running this week, and I’m sure this will be one of the highlights of my semester.

As I start my 20th year, I think back to the 1990s, when my wife and I were on staff with Cru. Through books like Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Albert Wolters’ Creation Regained, and a sentence that shot off the page as one of those God giving obvious guidance moments from Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines, we decided I would pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy in order to teach at a non-religious university.

I recall one person trying to discourage me, saying I wouldn’t get a job because of the bad job market. But I was not dissuaded, primarily because the call was so clear to me. And God was gracious enough to provide a place where I could pursue the kind of work I want to do, with wonderful colleagues and students that I really enjoy.

So as I start another academic year, I’m grateful for many things. My family, my church, and that I actually get to spend my time teaching, reading, and writing about things that matter for living a truly fulfilling and flourishing human life.