First the bad news: I’m suspending my “Science and Christian Education” blog series.  I simply can’t keep up with it right now.

Now the good news: The entire series, Science Education in Private Christian Schools, has been made into videos!  For those of you familiar with my other videos – forget about it!  This new series is definitely a “cut above” the rest.  I can promise that you WILL be sharing these with friends and family who have added you to their “prayer list” for accepting the scientific consensus on origins. 

I hope this series of video lessons will actually provide a valuable service.  For those of you in academia who are too busy doing real science to stop and “explain yourself” to every curious Christian that thinks you’re living a double-life, I want these videos to be a valuable resource that you refer people to often.  Articulating the EC/TE position can be challenging, and sometimes the subtle nuancing required gets lost in the brevity of the response.  These videos are of sufficient quality to refer to students, parents or other faculty who might not be thrilled that you actually teach useful science in the science classroom (imagine that?).  They can also be used in a teacher training setting to stimulate discussion about how we present the natural sciences to our students without appearing to have “sold out” to secularism.

There are a total of 12 lessons, ranging from 6 min to 20 min each, with most of them averaging about 10 min.  They are very easy to watch, full of graphics, illustrations, audio and anecdotes that reinforce the narration.  I’m also going to make them available on DVD for only the cost of burning a disk and mailing it.

The first 7 lessons are ready to post, and I’m going to put them up soon.  I would have posted Lesson 1 today but I had some technical difficulty with my FLV conversion utility.  If anybody can convert AVI files into quality FLV files, please let me know.  My web-hosting service has a free FLV converter but it makes my stuff look like garbage.  The plan is to post one lesson every few days or so.  That should give me enough time to finish editing lessons 8-12 while I get the first 7 up.

Here are the lesson titles:

Lesson 1:   Seeing Through a Glass Darkly
Lesson 2:   Science, Naturalism and Materialism
Lesson 3:   Proximate and Ultimate Causality
Lesson 4:   What is Chirstian Folk-Science?
Lesson 5:   A Brief History of Folk-Science
Lesson 6:   Christian Folk Science Today
Lesson 7:   Young-Earth Creationism
Lesson 8:   Flood Geology
Lesson 9:   Special Creation Part 1
Lesson 10: Special Creation Part 2
Lesson 11: Intelligent Design
Lesson 12: Closing Thoughts

Please spread the word!

In other news, I received the typeset manuscript for the second printing of BTF this weekend from the publisher.  As I’ve mentioned previously, there were many typographical mistakes that ended up in the initial release, and I’m very excited about having the opportunity to clean those up.  Moreover, we added an endorsements page in the front with gracious remarks from folks like: John Walton, Loren Haarsma, Steve Matheson and others, as well a few remarks from fellow EC and TE bloggers listing their URLs. 

I assume that most of my readers also frequent Steve Martin’s blog.  But if not, I recently posted an essay there about Teaching Evolution in Private Christian Schools.  Click here to read it.  Also, this (click here)  is a good example of why I keep a list of interesting blogs on my blogroll.  If you check my blog and are bummed ’cause there is nothing new, check my blogroll.  There is always something interesing happening there.

Check back frequently, and please give me some feedback on the videos.  Since I’m intending these to be a resource for the community, I’m going to hold off on rendering the final DVD tracks until folks have had time to review and comment on the on-line versions.

GJG

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Christian Education, News and Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.