Graduation treadmill

These books offer valuable wisdom for this season of commencement | Marvin Olasky

Gregory Koukl's Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions (Zondervan, 2009) is a clever book to give new graduates who want to stand tall in their new communities and workplaces but fear that they'll come up short. Koukl succinctly offers Columbo approaches (remember the TV show?) and also shows how to deal with self-destructive arguments and magazine assaults. For example, is the statement "There is no truth" true? Is it an absolute that "There are no absolutes"?

One reason some students even at Christian colleges graduate without adequate intellectual defenses is that many faculties join in what C.S. Lewis calls "the quest for the inner ring" (Ring worms, Nov. 22, 2003). Anne Hendershott's well-written critique of Catholic higher education, Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education (Transaction, 2009), shows how some professors worship academic idols instead of Christ. Her work supplements perfectly James Burtchaell's authoritative volume from 1998, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches.