Behind Infinity

Wow. Life just keeps on going.

This week at work was very busy on account of Acton University, which is described as “a unique exploration of the intellectual foundations of a free society.” Basically, it’s an annual four-day conference that we held at GVSU’s Eberhard Center with about 400 participants from 53 countries and many distinguished lecturers.

Being a new hire, I was allowed (and encouraged) to attend as much of the conference as I could, sitting in on whatever lectures, mealtimes, and discussions I wanted. It was a really great experience in many ways. First of all, I really enjoyed sitting with other conference participants at mealtimes. On the first night of the conference, I was seated at a table with people from California, Austria, Argentina, Columbia, and Africa. Conversation was lively and intelligent, because each of the hand-picked conference participants (ranging from undergrad and grad students to pastors to missionaries to government officials to teachers to professors to economists) was passionate about gaining knowledge and then using that knowledge to impact their communities, their countries, and by virtue of this, the world. It was a real blessing–and an eye-opener–to be around so many passionate and intelligent people from such diverse backgrounds: there were people who have access to extreme wealth, and those who have seen and felt extreme poverty. They were diverse in color, in accent, in age, in status, in religious denomination. But we all had(have) the same goals: to be edified, to bring about a more virtuous society by means of right beliefs regarding human dignity and the corresponding economic practices, and to bring glory to God the Father and Jesus Christ. To recognize and understand this was very encouraging and awe-inspiring. After that first dinner, Acton Institute’s founder and president Father Robert Sirico gave an opening address, his Thoughts on Human Dignity (mp3, 28 minutes). It was a very good talk, quite inspiring and profound I thought, and the first time I’ve heard Father Robert speak.

I made a point of it to attend four sessions’ worth of foundational lectures, which covered basic (but important) issues such as Christian anthropology (i.e. every man made in the image of God and the implications of this), the idea of limited government, and some commonly-believed myths about economics and the market. A lot of it was stuff I had heard before in the office or read in other materials, however it was quite beneficial to hear it all systematized and synthesized in this way. I was also able to hear a lecture on Tensions in 18th Century Social Thought by one of my esteemed co-workers, Michael Miller, and two particularly good lectures by another one of my co-workers, Dr. Jay Richards. He is a philosopher and one of his specialties is a Biblical perspective on stewardship of the environment. Personally, I find his perspective to be very balanced and well thought-out–neither too alarmist, nor “in denial”. His lecture A Biblical Approach to the Environment (mp3, 32 minutes) was recorded, and while his talk “What should Christians think of Global Warming?” was not recorded at this conference, it is available on video at the Acton Research website.

There were many, many more great talks I would have liked to sit in on but with so many people to take care of the conference required an “all hands on deck” policy, so I really was lucky that I got to hear as many lectures as I did. During Acton U week, everyone is involved in making sure the conference runs smoothly. In light of this, I was stolen from my boss (the webmaster) and consigned to our IT guy as his lackey-for-a-week. It was an exciting change of pace, to be sure. Together, we were responsible for the technology needs of the conference, which chiefly meant setting up and configuring the bevy of computers and projectors that display the PowerPoint presentations used by our lecturers. It was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait action–our services were generally called for between each lecture session, when we had 15 minutes to switch out about 8 computers and projectors spread across the GVSU downtown campus. When a lecture session ended, we sprang into action, set things up, dealt with picky projectors and screwed-up computers, and then headed back into the war room to wait until it was time to do it all over again. It was fun. In a totally stressful and hectic sort of way. I also helped with book tables and photocopies and whatever else needed doing. Overall, I feel like I got to know several of my co-workers a lot better this week, and I really enjoyed getting the chance to do that.

I’m kind of bummed that I have to go back to sitting in the office all week next week…but then again, it will also be kind of nice to have some peace and quiet…
whatever. I can’t wait until Acton University 2009.