In his talk Your Teacher Eats with Tax Collectors and Sinners: You, Cornerstone and the Mission of ACU, Dr. Richard Beck explores the tensions we face when we live out the “missional impulse.” How are we to be “in but not of” the world? His Spotlight investigates Jesus’ command that we should “desire mercy, not sacrifice” using various “ways of knowing”–from the Bible to Shakespeare to science–illustrating the skills at the heart of the Cornerstone experience: the multi-disciplinary exploration of truth and our mission in the world.
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LISTEN to Dr. Vic McCracken’s interview with Dr. Beck
Exploring Spotlight Resources
Cornerstone is a class created to introduce you to “ways of knowing,” the different strategies we use to determine what is “true.”
In his Spotlight lecture, Dr. Beck compares three “ways of knowing”:
- Faith: Using Scripture, the church and the Holy Spirit to understand God’s truth.
- Human Experience: The collective witness of the human spirit, captured in history, art, literature, and the social sciences.
- Science: The systematic use of observation used to explore the cosmos.
This list is certainly broad and incomplete but serves to introduce various approaches to the question of “truth” and how these truths might be discovered.
One of the goals we want to accomplish this semester is to demonstrate that sometimes these various “ways of knowing” are reinforcing and complementary. Dr. Beck illustrates this approach in his Spotlight, showing how the Bible, science, and the humanities might help us understand the challenge of our mission to be “in but not of” the world.
To encourage further exploration in class discussion or on the blog, dive into one of the Spotlight Resources modules before our next meeting.
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Join the Conversation
If you have a question for this week’s speaker or would like to share a conclusion of your own, please post it as a comment below. We welcome off-campus voices to the public Cornerstone dialogue as long as they are respectful and contribute meaningfully to these curricular discussions. See the ACU Blogs Terms of Use or About Cornerstone for more information.
Spotlight Resources
The Morality of Liberals and Conservatives
Biography
Dr. Richard Beck is a professor of psychology, a researcher in the psychology of religion, and a blogger whose wide-ranging interests include Orthodox Iconography and the Theology of Calvin and Hobbes.