ARTICLES
Photo Danny Ebersole ‘11
of Avila, Luther, Calvin, Dostoyevsky, Martin Luther King, C. S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, and others. Location, Location, and Location
The program also serves as a bridge between Gordon and the cultural opportunities afforded by Gordon’s location. Over the years, JAF participants have visited a Shaker village, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody-Essex Museum, Harvard’s Fogg Museums, Hellenic College, Boston College, the Museum of Science, and more. What is more, alumni trips have taken students to farflung destinations including Orvieto, Rome, Florence, Wittenberg, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and San Antonio, Texas. Word of the program has spread far and wide. “Gordon College’s Jerusalem and Athens Forum is a model of Christian undergraduate excellence. The graduate fellows that we have accepted from this program have been invariably of a high caliber,” says Joe Creech, Program Director at the Lilly Graduate Fellows Program at Valparaiso University. The Jerusalem and Athens Forum been singled out by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Choosing the Right College. Along with Gordon’s Elijah Project, JAF is even the subject of a chapter in a forthcoming book by William Sullivan, a former senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Where They Go
JAF has helped launch students into some of the most prestigious and competitive graduate programs, at universities including Yale, Princeton, Notre Dame, Boston College, Boston University, Duke, the University of Edinburgh, Oxford, Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brandeis. Program alumni have
interned or worked at the White House, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wall Street Journal, and the Consortium of Christian Colleges and Universities. “The Jerusalem and Athens Forum was one of the most meaningful and important experiences of my undergraduate career. I received rigorous academic training and participated in a meaningful community of students and professors,” says Elizabeth Baker, ’12, who participated in JAF during her sophomore year at Gordon. She is now pursuing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a Presidential Fellow and a member of the sixth cohort of the Lilly Graduate Fellows Program.
TOP 10
Reunions
benchmark anniversary approaches,
JAF celebrates its tenth anniversary with two events. The first, a panel of JAF alumni, took place during Gordon’s 2013 Homecoming and Family Weekend in late September. After the discussion, panelist Amy Gentile ’08 emphasized that JAF “remains the most memorable educational experience of my life thus far. I tell people that all the time, and I’m so thankful for how that course shaped me as a student, as a thinker, and as a teacher.” She currently teaches math and writing for an innovative new online high school program in New Hampshire. The second event marking the anniversary will be a banquet celebration around the time of the tenth annual JAF debate in April 2014. Since 2004, the JAF program has accepted 140 participants. “Many species live for 10 years or less,” says Tal Howard, “but I’d like to think that the JAF program has just emerged from infancy to adolescence. The road ahead is now paved with more than good intentions; we can draw on the wisdom of what we’ve learned.”
JAF is part of the Center for Faith and Inquiry (CFI), which recently co-hosted the conference “Protestantism? Reflections in Advance of the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.” To bone up on Reformation studies as that CFI recommends these “top 10” works on the Reformation. Mark A. Noll, Protestantism: A Very Short Introduction Louis Boyer, The Word, Church and Sacraments in Protestantism and Catholicism Steven Ozment, Protestantism: The Birth of a Revolution Alister McGrath, Introduction to Protestant Thought Timothy George, Reading Scripture with the Reformers Robert Jensen and Carl Braaten (editors), The Catholicity of the Reformation Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil Bradley S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society Euan Cameron, The European Reformation Mark Noll, Carolyn Nystrom, Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Roman Catholicism www.gordon.edu/protestantism/ understanding
FALL 2013 | STILLPOINT 31