Wheaton College suspends Christian professor who wore a hijab

[CopyBoy]

Larycia Hawkins has a fan in Egypt.

Theresa, the nine-months-pregnant wife of a Coptic Orthodox juice stand owner, could not hide her admiration when told how a Christian professor had donned a hijab in solidarity with Muslims facing prejudice in America.

“It is a beautiful thing she has done, going beyond the norm to better approach others,” she said.

“But it would not work here.”

Her comment came on the heels of her husband Hani’s discomfort. He called the symbolic act “extreme.”

In doing so, the humble man mixing mango and strawberry mirrored the reactions of most regional evangelical and Orthodox theologians to the core question of the Wheaton College dispute: not Hawkins’s hijab, but her “same God” explanation for it. All commended her intentions, but only one—the Palestinian head of a seminary—praised it as a stand for justice.

christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/january-web-only/arab-christians-wheaton-college-larycia-hawkins-same-god.html

 

[CopyBoy]

**Wheaton College Faculty Council Asks Administrators Not to Fire ‘We Worship Same God’ Professor **

WHEATON, Ill. — The faculty council at Wheaton College has unanimously agreed to ask administrators to withdraw its decision to begin proceedings to fire a controversial associate political science director who was placed on leave after she declared in a self-initiated campaign to fight “Islamophobia” that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

“Following recent discussions between faculty council, President Ryken and Provost Jones, Faculty Council unanimously recommended to administration that the administrative leave and the notification of termination ‘for cause’ of Dr. Larycia Hawkins be withdrawn due to grave concerns about the process,” Lynn Cohick, New Testament professor and chair of the council, wrote in an email to faculty.

christiannews.net/2016/01/22/wheaton-college-faculty-council-asks-administrators-not-to-fire-we-worship-same-god-professor/

 

[FrankLJ]

So, she’s gone. They withdrew termination proceedings and let her resign; jumped before she was pushed.

Thanks for the links above, they were very helpful. What I got out of it was that ‘same God’ is the wrong approach. More helpful is to say, flatly, “There is one God”, then go on to say there are different ideas about His nature. Which does not mean that all ideas are equally valid.

 

[ltwin]

The reality is that Ms Hawkins is being a provocateur to a highly conservative Christian Collegiate culture. She is trying to make them think and they don’t like it; especially with things like Black Liberation Theology. Whether she is pushing too hard or they are pushing back too hard is mostly a matter of perspective and one has to really know more about the situation to have a fervent opinion. Either way if the whole episode sparks thought, she just may be doing her job in the first place.

Let’s not be confused. Wheaton is no Bob Jones University. Wheaton College is where thinking evangelicals go to school. They aren’t afraid to think; they’re afraid of contributing to the prevailing cultural notion that all religions are equivalent and interchangeable. Like it or not, this professor is a representative of the college, and if she decides to make vague references to Christians and Muslims worshiping the same God it does become in the minds of many people that “an evangelical college believes that Islam is basically as good an option as Christianity.”

The college’s priority is to ensure that the institution’s religious message and identity is not undermined by the provocative public statements of its faculty. If the professor wanted to make the point that Muslims worship the same God as Christians but with an imperfect and incomplete understanding, a blurb on social media was probably not the way to do it.