Purduegatory

Our title is an ironic take on the Roman Catholic notion of "purgatory"--a place where you wait and work, earning your way to heaven. One of our purposes is to challenge the notion that graduate school is a waiting period before we enter productive work in Christ's Kingdom. As a group, our prayer is that our work will bring every thought captive to Christ.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Suffering

The topic of suffering has been on my mind a lot lately, and its no wonder why. This Lord's Day the Lafayette RPC sat under two sermons on the topic of responding to suffering. In weekly Bible study, we're reading and examining 1 Peter, which has a lot to say on suffering. Not only that, I just introduced the students of Crown & Covenant Academy to Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, in which she recounts, among other things, her daughter dying in her arms and witnessing the abuse of a pregnant woman.

A new book by John Piper and Justin Taylor addresses the topic of human suffering and God's sovereignty well. You can read the introduction and first chapter of Suffering and the Sovereignty of God here as a pdf. Piper calls us to celebrate God's sovereignty over Satan. I'm posting this here (rather than on my other blog) because I've noticed that many of my academic friends and colleagues have a deep desire for justice, and a sense that their work benefits the poor and oppressed. My question for you, then, is what do you think academic work does to ease the pain of living in a fallen world? Is our work in Christ's Kingdom restorative?

3 Comments:

Blogger Elizabeth said...

Some ways linguists (hopefully) alleviate suffering:

1) Neurolinguistics and structural linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) inform the field of speech-language pathology, leading to better methods of rehabilitating accident and stroke victims with impaired speech and teaching those with delays or difficults to help them adapt to their environment. It's especially hard to learn without using language, so for young children with pathology issues it is particularly crucial to understand their language development and help them, their parents and their teachers to further the progression of their education.

2) Applied linguists study the way linguistic knowledge can be used to further the teaching and learning of languages, leading to increased cross-cultural communication. Translation studies are also important in this vein. Both allow the individual a broader understanding of the world in which he lives and the ideas that have been put forth in that world, alleviating the suffering of ignorance, as well as creating opportunities to share the Gospel, alleviating both mortal and eternal suffering for those who believe it.

3) Sociolinguistics aims to see the acknowledgement of all varieties of language, used by any group, as valid and worthy and expressive of the identity of the user(s). This has led and will hopefully continue to lead to efforts to preserve dying languages and to eliminate the oppression of minority languages, to the breaking down of stereotypes and prejudices (racial or otherwise) as majority language speakers are helped to understand that non-mainstream varieties of language are equally as structured and not indicative of inferiority or a lack of intelligence, and to the empowerment of the individual as he comes to understand that he has a choice about how he speaks, which he can use to his advantage.

4) All subdomains of linguistics contribute to an understanding that language and social interaction are incredibly ordered and patterned and not just random, which will hopefully contribute to the alleviation of suffering caused by the persistent myth of macroevolution, which has been used far too long to oppose and oppress Christian thinking and discourage young Christians from pursuing advanced study of the sciences.

18/10/06 13:31  
Blogger Micah said...

Environmental soil scientists help clean up contaminated soil so that we don't die from it.

18/10/06 15:06  
Blogger Shannon Koons said...

I've had the same impression from my academic counterparts. Sometimes I think they do a much better job at wanting to serve the poor and oppressed than Christians do. I've read Edith Schaeffer's Affliction and Lewis's Problem of Pain, but I'll have to check out the new Piper book.

For my academic contribution, uh... Music gives those suffering an outlet for expression?

19/10/06 12:57  

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