I keep reading that as King Kong and Shodan, and I fear for King Kong.
The really stupid and pittable aspect of this story is that Hawkins is right. Muslims follow the God of Abraham, same as Christians. It is the same god, even if the faiths have different approaches towards it.
Also, from a Christian perspective, Muslims really ought to receive more respect than they are getting right now. They face discrimination and slander, the kind of people Christians ostensibly defend. Hawkins is right.
Of course, if you are a Confederate flag waving kind of person, then yeah, Muslims are right up there with the homos and the darkies as a group to suppress and harass. What I simply cannot wrap my head around is why evangelicals and fundamentalists in general so often resemble Confederate flag waving kinds of people rather than resembling anything to do with anything Jesus said or exemplified.
What a world! The people who claim to be the most religious and zealous about doing the right thing are so often the very worst people! Wheaton can blow me!
This is important, and bears repeating, especially in light of how academic careers work. Professor Hawkins has earned tenure at Wheaton. Tenure is valuable (or should be – it clearly doesn’t mean as much as it should at Wheaton if they are able to fire her for her beliefs, rather than documented malfeasance or incompetence. But at any rate, it’s pretty much the Holy Grail of an academic career, the reward people spend about a significant chunk of their careers pursuing.) It is not, except in rare cases,* transportable; having earned tenure at one institution does not mean you will be hired with tenure at another. At best, you might be hired at the assistant-professor level and have to earn tenure and promotion again, sometimes with a shortened timeline; at worst, search committees are simply going to ignore your application, because they figure you won’t be satisfied with the entry-level position they can offer you, and there are hundreds of unemployed new PhDs who will.
- Mostly, those rare cases involve research superstars who can be hired at the associate or full professor level at prestigious research institutions. People who work at a liberal arts college like Wheaton have, for the most part, chosen NOT to have that kind of career; at institutions like that, the path to tenure and promotion involves sinking all of your time and energy into excellent teaching, service to the institution, and active involvement in campus activities (i.e., showing up to your students’ choir concerts, going to all the panels at the conference your department hosts every year, that sort of thing). Lots of faculty, myself included, are thrilled to take this bargain, but the price is that these activities have very little value when you’re looking for another job, even though they may be immensely valued at your particular institution. Once you’ve committed to that sort of career, there’s usually no way out other than going into administration – which Professor Hawkins is obviously not going to be permitted to do at Wheaton, even if she wants to be an administrator, which she may not. So, assuming that she isn’t interested in a total career change, her best bet is to stay and fight.
Regards
Do you have a job, Big T?
But she has no right to do anything but run away with her tail between her legs, right?
[QUOTE=]
Originally Posted by Larycia Hawkins
While Wheaton College can signify that employees sign a statement of faith and adhere to it (and I do), they did not give me Jesus and they can’t take him away.
Wheaton College cannot hold me to a different standard, a higher standard, than they hold every other employees to.
Wheaton College cannot scare me into walking away from the truth that all humans, Muslims, the vulnerable, the oppressed, are all my sisters and brothers.
Wheaton College cannot intimidate me into cowering in fear of the enemy of the month as defined by real estate moguls, Senators from Texas, Christians from this country, bigots, and fundamentalists of all stripes.
Wheaton College will never induce me to kowtow to their doublespeak concerning the Statement of Faith, so as to appease an imaginary constituency that clearly knows little about what academic freedom or Christian love mean; or to placate platinum donors to their coffers.
Wheaton College will never hear me disavow my religious family tree—that would be the height of academic dishonesty; the nadir of historical revisionism, and a repudiation of the Christian narrative where the central figure is a Hebrew from Nazareth who was despised and rejected, from Podunk Nazareth, who nevertheless set captives free and is still dong so today.
Wheaton College cannot place me in a theological corner or a trumped up Statement of Faith Corner. The last time I was put in the corner was the 4th grade and that was undeserved. I won’t ever be put in such a corner again.
[/QUOTE]
Great stuff. Out-Christianizing intolerant Christians is always a Good Thing.
Sez who? Deities are human constructs and there is no ultimate canon.
Not since Disney took them over, anyway.
Sure, I understand that, people can be very intertwined with their particular community.
But, as the punchline of the joke goes, if you want to get to there, you don’t start from here. If you want to have a rational conversation about improvement, religion is the wrong place to start; religions are conservative and based on dogma.
I’m not suggesting taking it all literally. Taking it as a human construct, as the story goes, both Muslims and Christians worship the god of Abraham. There is plenty of support for this view. No?
Sure but since it’s a human construct it can be constructed however the humans involved want to construct it. If some decide they want their construct to be that the Muslim and Christian gods are not the same then - for them - so be it.
In reply to the OP, Wheaton College. The professor is probably dumb as an individual, but Wheaton College, and by extension the whole town, is a concentrated pool of dumbth.
I heard Larycia Hawkins interviewed today. You might not get her priorities, but she’s not stupid.
Except Christians believe in a triune God, who came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ. Muslims do not. That’s what Wheaton wanted the professor to clarify in a theological follow-up statement, but she has declined the opportunity.
That’s just details about the properties of the Abrahamic God which non-Christian worshippers of that God do not accept. Are the Wheatonites asserting that they themselves do not worship the Abrahamic God? If so, that’s something that they should be clarifying.
Ah, but we are talking about bible literalists. I don’t see how those could claim that YWHW/Jehovah is somehow not the god of Abraham. Human construct? Ok, but it comes from somewhere, and we can all take a look at the sources and see what they say for ourselves.
Bible literalists aren’t actually bible literalists. They pick and choose, select and ignore as required.
Neither do the Jews.
and as Malthus in the other thread found, they have in the past not had any problem with statements that are essentially and even exactly the same.
So either they have some how changed their theology or in fact they have what is not actually a theological but a political issue with her, in a climate of american islamophobia.
yes indeed, either they have to say they reject the Jews worshipping the same god as they (I think political toxin to them) or they are simply making political decisions instead of religious ones.
It seems clear from the evidence that Malthus has cited in the other thread that there is no real theological aspect to this, but a change in approach on socio-political reasons. That is of course hypocrisy. Sad.
To whom, exactly, do they need to clarify that?