Did the earth once have two moons?

April 17th, 2012

millis By Dr. John P. Millis, assistant professor of physics at Anderson University.

Ask any elementary school aged child what that bright object is in the night sky and they will, undoubtedly, reply that it is the Moon.

This grayish orb has been studied and scrutinized for millennia by astronomers across the globe. Over the years we have come to understand more and more about our nearest neighbor, and that knowledge took a large leap forward during the Apollo Moon landings when samples were gathered and brought back to Earth for analysis.

There have also been unmanned missions to orbit the Moon, to analyze both what we see (the familiar side of the Moon that always faces the Earth) as well as the far side of the Moon which most of us never observe — except perhaps in pictures.

Even after all of this study there are still properties of the Moon that baffle scientists. And perhaps the biggest mystery of them all is why the far side of the Moon appears so different than the side that we see every day.

Read the complete article at space.about.com.

Posted in Voices from the Valley

Business education lacks taste of a cookie

February 1st, 2012

dulaney by Dr. Emmett Dulaney, associate professor of marketing at the Anderson University Falls School of Business.

Around my house, nachos and cheese counts as a two-course meal.

That was not the case when I was growing up. My mother made one meat dish and one potato dish for every dinner. There would also be a salad of some type — some things that looked pretty questionable got lumped into this category — and a minimum of two sides. It was like eating at Cracker Barrel every evening.

The part of the supper that I looked forward to the most, though, came when that food was finished. My father insisted that we have dessert for every meal and that there not be leftovers. Every day, therefore, my mother would bake one of about a dozen desserts that she rotated through. When you’re baking every day and doing the same thing over and over again, you tend to get very good at it and she got exceptional at making desserts.

You might not think you can do that much with chocolate chip cookies since everyone tends to start with some derivative of the Nestle Tollhouse recipe, but it is actually surprising the results you can get. For example, she would use two baking sheets together — one on top of another — so that air was trapped between them and the bottom would not cook as much as the rest of the cookie. This allows the cookies to still be golden brown on all but the bottom yet be moist and not dry. She would also use more vanilla extract than others do — doubling it in fact — since it serves to pull out the flavor of the other ingredients. Lastly, she would mix in other forms of chocolate in addition to the full helping of chips just to add to the flavor.

Posted in Voices from the Valley

Exploring Christian education from a Wesleyan holiness perspective

July 25th, 2011

Dr. John Aukerman, Anderson University School of Theology by Dr. John Aukerman, professor of Christian Education, director of distance education, and director of outcomes assessment at the Anderson University School of Theology.

I was hired to teach in the Anderson University School of Theology in 1984, and have searched in vain for a good comprehensive textbook to use in my Christian education classes. Every new book that came along was either incomplete, or had a theological bent that was inconsistent with our Wesleyan holiness tradition.

So you can imagine my interest when I received a desk copy of a new Christian education book in the Fall of 2008. I thought to myself, “Maybe this is the book I’ve been looking for!” So I took it home one weekend and started reading.

I hadn’t gotten more than four chapters into it when I saw that there was no way I could use that book. First, it was too simplistic: for example, it attempted to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity with various drawings of triangles. Second, it was too biased toward a particular theological perspective and would have required constant explanations in class about why we don’t believe this way.

Now you can imagine my disappointment. After so many years of looking for “the right textbook,” here was another one that failed to measure up. I noticed that it had been written by two Christian education professors, and I thought, while I certainly didn’t have the ability to write “the right textbook,” perhaps I could team up with my counterparts in our other Church of God institutions and together we could write this book!

Posted in SOT News, Voices from the Valley

Observing the Sufi

April 20th, 2011

caldwells by Dr. Carl Caldwell, vice president for academic affairs and dean emeritus at Anderson University

As I learned about the history and practice of Islam, I came to understand that Sufism is one of its many expressions. The word Sufi comes from the Arabic word for wool, and derived from the simple clothing that Sufis wore. Sufis gathered around charismatic leaders who aspired to lead them in a path toward mystical union with God. Each of these groups was called a tariqa, derived from the Arabic word for path.

In my time of full-time teaching at Manchester College, many years ago, one of my colleagues observed and was allowed to record and photograph a Sufi service in Cairo, Egypt. He then prepared a module of slides and cassette tape narrative illustrating that service. Ever since watching and listening to his materials, which I used regularly when teaching about religion in the Middle East, I have been fascinated with the Sufis. Their conscious decision to gather regularly, and then be led through a well-ordered liturgy of chants and body motions so as to work themselves into religious ecstasy seemed then and still seems to run so counter to the prevailing secular, rational culture. The most famous of Turkish Sufis who do this today are the so-called whirling dervishes whose graceful circular motions are an esthetic wonder. There are many other groups from India to North Africa. But the point is, I have been interested in Sufis.

Posted in Voices from the Valley

Where does history happen?

February 9th, 2011

murphy by Dr. David Murphy, professor of history at Anderson University

Two things typically happen when people learn that I teach history at Anderson University. First, they tell me with enthusiasm of their own interest in history. Then, they lament what many studies describe as indifference toward history among today’s younger students.

I like the first part of this. It’s always interesting to learn just what kinds of history are interesting to people who are not, like my students, under any compulsion to read assigned texts. But I don’t really share contemporary pessimism about an alleged lack of interest in our past. While my evidence is admittedly anecdotal, I see a robust interest in history among our undergraduates, with enrollment in history elective courses here (and at other nearby institutions) booming.

I believe we face a different problem when it comes to thinking about our past, though, that might be described as a sort of vision disorder. We’re sometimes afflicted with a kind of historical “far-sightedness”. Two decades of teaching history to undergraduates at Anderson University have taught me that most of us, including myself, have a tendency to ignore the history that happens around us. If I were to ask my students “Where does history happen?”, I have a feeling that most would answer “Not here.” We expect to find significant historical events taking place in suitably significant venues far away, and presume that sleepy, provincial places like our home town or county lack the grandeur or drama that proper settings for “history” ought to have.

Posted in Voices from the Valley

Meeting Miss Margaret

January 13th, 2011

deborah-miller-fox by Deborah Miller Fox, assistant professor of English at Anderson University

During the drafting of my young adult novel, A Star for Robbins Chapel, I recognized the need for what Silas House calls spiritual research and method writing, both of which allow a writer to get inside the skin of her character and acquire that character’s understanding of the landscape she inhabits. Spiritual research can include experiences like immersing oneself in music typical of the region or time period in which the story is set, wearing the shoes or kinds of clothing that the characters wore, engaging in the activities that are central to the character’s life, such as plowing a field or canning applesauce, and eliminating modern technologies from one’s daily life in order to experience darkness or quiet or summer heat the way the character would. Set in the Cumberland Mountains of southwest Virginia, my story depicted the life of a migrant family in 1905. Though I had what Scott Russell Sanders would call “window knowledge” of Lee County, Virginia, acquired from my childhood trips to visit two great-grandmothers living in Pennington Gap, I did not know the voice and manners of Appalachian speech intimately enough to render the dialogue and character thoughts authentically. Though I was writing from a chronological perspective 100 years past the time of my characters’ lives, I knew I could collapse that distance by talking with people who inhabit Virginia and Tennessee today, thus tuning my ear to the syntax, colloquialisms, and aural rhythms in the voices of southwestern Appalachia.

Posted in Voices from the Valley

Serving society by serving employees

January 6th, 2011

[The following is an abstract of a study conducted by Dr. David J. Hagenbuch, associate professor of marketing at Messiah College; Dr. Steven W. Little, principal consultant, InfoWorks, Inc.; and Dr. Doyle J. Lucas, professor of management and DBA program director at Anderson University. The study was presented at the 2010 Christian Business Faculty Association (CBFA) Conference, Oct. 21-23, 2010, in Lakeland, Fla.]

lucas Many top employees are interested in working for socially responsible companies that allow them to make meaningful contributions to their local communities and the world. While research has found a positive relationship between corporate social responsibility and employer attractiveness, the current study has extended the line of inquiry by examining prospective employees’ attraction to three specific approaches to corporate social performance (CSP): donation, volunteerism, and operational integration. This empirical analysis, which involved a survey of over 1,800 students from small private colleges and large public universities located in seven states, produced several significant findings, although surprisingly only partial support for the study’s three main hypotheses. As expected, the sample as a whole demonstrated significantly more attraction to volunteerism than to donation. Interestingly, however, prospective employees rated operational integration significantly lower than both volunteerism and donation. As a result, several intriguing questions have emerged, namely why job candidates are not more attracted to organizations that integrate their economic and social goals. The findings hold important implications for educators and for businesses wanting to better serve their employees and society.

Read the full manuscript of the study: Serving Society By Serving Employees [PDF]

Voices from the Valley is a venue for members of the Anderson University community to share unique perspectives on topics for which they are qualified to speak. For more information, contact the Office of University Communications.

Anderson University is a private Christian university of 2,600 undergraduate and graduate students in central Indiana. Anderson continues to be recognized as a top Christian college: in 2010, U.S. News and World Report ranked Anderson University among the best colleges and universities in the Midwest for the seventh consecutive year. Established in 1917 by the Church of God, Anderson University offers more than 65 undergraduate majors and graduate programs in business, education, music, nursing, and theology.

Posted in Voices from the Valley

Academic and Christian discovery

September 17th, 2010

edwards

by Dr. James L. Edwards, Anderson University president

Some of the best news of the year came to our campus when Bill Polian, president of the Indianapolis Colts, announced that the premier NFL franchise would return to Anderson University for their summer camp Aug. 1-18. We hosted the Colts for their first 15 years in Indianapolis before they moved the camp to Terre Haute. Only one member of the team, now a powerhouse with regular playoff wins, divisional championships, and a Super Bowl win, was at the last Anderson camp: the league’s most valuable player, quarterback Peyton Manning.

This good news comes to a region looking for reasons to celebrate as we climb out of the severe recession that has had a grip on this former automotive manufacturing town. Our friends in the business community hope a return of a national spotlight with the Colts will mean other commercial interests and resources for quality of life will also be on the rise.

Posted in Voices from the Valley