Contributing Bloggers
Personal Blog: Thinking Christian
Steve Parker is the Associate Dean (Academic) at Flinders University School of Nursing & Midwifery. He holds a PhD in nursing and a degree in education. His teaching areas are critical thinking, interpersonal communication, research, and ethics. Steve's theological interests are eclectic, he loves thinking critically and resists any attempts to confine himself within any ideological box. Steve celebrates doubt as an ongoing opportunity to learn and grow. He attends a Seventh-day Adventist church at Morphett Vale, South Australia but has discovered that the freedom of God's grace transcends denominational and religious boundaries and gives no one the right to tell him (or anyone else) what they should believe. He believes that following Jesus is a life of enjoyment, risk-taking, eternal growth, humble revisioning of belief, and loving others. Steve enjoys reading widely, watching movies, is married and has two teenage girls.
Andy, we were at PUC together. After going away to teach for a year and going in the army for a couple of years, I finished my undergraduate work in psychology at University of the Pacific. Then I did a masters and PhD at UC Davis in biological psychology. I did a postdoc at U of Washington, then taught at Humboldt State for awhile. I left academia in 1982 and served as a zoo curator, science editor at National Geographic, and rounded out my career working for an NIH research contractor. I've been retired and consulting for about ten years. My only academic connection now is as a research professor of anthropology at George Washington University in D.C.
University Librarian from 1965 to 2004, specialties Reference and Information Services, Collection Management, and Administration. Retired from California State University, Pomona.
Mother of two, grandmother of two, wife of one husband of 48 years.
BA, Pacific Union College; MA; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Ph.D., USC (University of Southern California).
Interested in and some experience with the practices of Buddhism. Have read work of the following authors –- Karen Armstrong, Bishop John S. Spong, Burton Mack, and others; Jack Kornfield, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other Buddihist authors; and some Jewish authors, as well. I am a 3rd generation SDA, though I no longer define myself within the narrow confines of Adventist theology.
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Steve, I remember very well a conversation I had more than 50 years ago with Elder Hyde, my "Biblical Philosophy" teacher at Pacific Union College. I expressed to him the feeling I had that I did not see a need for there to be a promise of paradise as a reward for living a Christian life. It seemed to me that living an honest, full, and constructive life was sufficiently rewarding in itself. Living a certain way in order to obtain a reward seemed out if place to me. Elder Hyde seemed to think that I was thinking dangerously.... Maybe he was correct.
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