One of the key distinctives of Covenant’s faculty is their keen attention to teaching students. What happens between professors and students, inside but also outside the classroom, is central and crucial for our mission, and Covenant alumni almost universally report that relationships with faculty members are at the top of the list of the most meaningful and transformative aspects of their college experience.

At the same time, we recognize that effective teaching rests, in significant measure, on effective and energetic scholarship. Our faculty’s ongoing scholarly inquiry necessarily and fruitfully informs the education Covenant students receive, as our faculty guides them in thoughtfully and biblically engaging current issues and conversations. While the majority of Covenant’s graduates will enter vocations other than academic, they will do so understanding the big questions of the whole range of intellectual pursuits and equipped to respond with Christian minds and hearts as those questions inevitably connect at vital points with their various life paths.

Not only does our faculty’s scholarship profoundly shape and bless our students, but it also reaches out beyond our campus as an exciting and important extension of Covenant College. Click to continue »

This spring semester we were pleased to have Leslie Leyland Fields on campus for the Nick Barker Writer-in-Residence program. Fields taught a class on Creative Nonfiction, and gave public readings of her own works. The Nick Barker Writer-in-Residence program honors retired Professor of English and former Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Nick Barker, and is funded by the generous financial support of an anonymous donor. You can listen to a podcast about the Nick Barker Writer-in-Residence program and read more about Leslie Leyland Fields at her website.

Here are some examples of our students’ responses to their class experience with Mrs. Fields:

I absolutely loved being part of this class….I learned so much about not only the creative nonfiction genre, but how to write….

I had always written one way and this class really stretched me to have to try writing from different angles.

It was a humbling and challenging experience. It took my love and skill for writing and directed its focus to Christ….it kept hounding gently the fact that I write for God.

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I just finished reading two books recommended by an acquaintance: Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences (Broadway Books, 2005), and Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Basic Books, 2007). The author of both books is Leonard Sax, a family physician and a psychologist.

In Why Gender Matters, Sax takes on the dogmas of gender-neutral child-rearing and social constructionism (the view that differences between girls and boys derive from social expectations with little or no input from biology), and presents a compelling account of the enormous price that children and society have paid for these modern experiments. Under the pervasive influence of blurred distinctions between male and female, particularly the erasure of gender distinctions in school program and curriculum, many children feel “less rooted” in their identity as boys or girls than at any time in our memory.

The neglect of gender in the raising and education of children has resulted in a loss of direction for the growing child and especially the adolescent. The adolescent today is like an explorer without a compass in a trackless wilderness, unsure of the path or the destination.

Consequences include dramatic increases in anxiety and depression among even young children, an elevated sense of instability and threat in their personal lives, and massive confusion about their own identities and about how to relate to one another. Click to continue »