College Faith
#24: Why Christian Students Must Understand Their and Other’s Worldviews
My guest today is Mike Schutt, Executive Director of the Worldview Academy. Mike has been thinking, writing, and consulting on worldview formation for over 30 years, including helping law students bring their worldview into the practice of law. His thoughts on worldview and Law have been published in his Redeeming Law: Christian Calling and the Legal Profession (InterVarsity Press, 2007).
In this podcast we discuss:
- What a worldview is
- Why it is so important to understand worldviews
- The benefits of living according to the biblical worldview
- How Mike discovered the importance of worldviews during college
- How worldview issues permeate all university classes
- Ways Christian students have faltered due to not understanding worldviews (especially related to views of knowledge and truth)
- How we are shaped by our culture’s worldview, often without knowing it
- The main worldviews we should understand
- Understanding worldview as both ideas and loves
- The relationship of worldview to our actions, wisdom and flourishing
- Why Christian students struggle so much with the scientific naturalist worldview
- How to evaluate worldviews and develop a robust and consistent biblical worldview
- Three simple questions to evalue any worldview claim made in classes or conversations
- The relationship between spiritual disciplines and living out the biblical worldview
- Ways your local church can help you develop your worldview
- Two questions to ask others in your church (or on campus) to find worldview mentors (and eventually mentor others)
- Why the Christian worldview is superior to all others
- Ways students can more fully live out their Christian worldview
- Changing ways students are interacting with Scripture
Resources mentioned during our conversation:
- Albert Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview
- James Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog
- Worldview Academy
- “How to Watch a Movie, Using Top Gun: Maverick as an Example,” College Faith podcast #23 with Drew Trotter
- James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
- C.S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed”
- C.S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Addresses
- Stand to Reason
- J.F. Baldwin, The Deadliest Monster: An Introduction to Worldviews
- J. Mark Bertrand, (Re)thinking Worldview: Learning to Live, Think, and Speak in the World
- Hearts and Mind Books
- Ashworth, Becker, et al., A Book for Hearts & Minds: What You Should Read and Why
- Nancy Pearcy, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity
- Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcy, How Now Shall We Live?
- J.P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul
- Gene Veith, God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life
- Gene Veith, Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture
- Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution
- Carl Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution