Faculty Staff Christian Fellowship
Purpose
The Faculty/Staff Christian Fellowship is a non-denominational group of faculty and staff at the University of Texas--Austin that exists to assist each other in doing the following:
- Sharing with the rest of the University community the good news that Jesus offers to everyone the possibility of a personal and meaningful relationship to the Creator.
- Cultivating a climate of thought and expression at U. T. that fosters the intelligent presentation and thoughtful examination of the claims of Christ.
- Helping to meet the needs -- intellectual, professional, emotional and spiritual -- of colleagues and students.
- Integrating the Christian faith with their own research and with their intellectual life as a whole.
Any member of the faculty or staff who shares these goals is welcome to join the group.
Activities
Weekly Fellowship Meetings.
We meet weekly, normally during the noon hour, to pray, to encourage one another, and to share ideas and experiences relevant to our calling as Christians in the University. This semester we are meeting at Wednesday from noon to 1 pm in CBA 4.430. We are discussing the task of relating our Christian faith to our vocations as teachers, scholars and scientists.
Faculty Friends Ads
Two or three times a year, we publish an advertisement in the Daily Texas , in which we list fifty or sixty faculty and staff members who wish to be identified as being available to students and others for reasoned dialogue about the truth and relevance of the Christian faith.
The 1997 Veritas Forum
A Veritas Forum will be held during the week of February 17-21, 1997 at the University of Texas. The first Veritas Forum was held at Harvard several years ago. The purpose of the Veritas Forum is to bring to campus a number of outside speakers and special events in order to raise the visibility and credibility of the message of Christianity. At the Veritas Forum this month, we are hosting:
- Kay Cole James, an articulate advocate for pro-life and pro-family policies in the public sphere. Dean of the School of Government, Regent University.
- Materials scientist Walter Bradley (Texas A & M University), author (with Charles Thaxton) of The Mystery of Life's Origin, who has spoken widely on the subject of scientific evidence for the existence of God.
- Philosopher Alvin Plantinga (University of Notre Dame), author of God and Other Minds, God, Freedom and Evil, and Warrant and Proper Function.
- Actor Tom Key, who will present his one-man show, C. S. Lewis on Stage.
- Legal scholar and noted author Phillip Johnson (Berkeley Law School), author of Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance,
Participation in the Conference on Naturalism, Theism and the Scientific Enterprise
Also this month, an interdisciplinary academic conference on Naturalism, Theism and the Scientific Enterprise will be held at the University of Texas, sponsored by the Philosophy Department. Many of us plan to attend and to assist in the local arrangements. Plantinga, Johnson, and Michael Ruse, a philosoper from the University of Guelph, author of Darwinism Defended, will be among the invited speakers.
Steering Committee
The Steering Committee of the FSCF consists of the following:
Created 8/12/96. Last updated 2/12/97.
UT Austin
Comments to koons@phil.utexas.edu