Student Blogs

This course is about putting ideas into lived experience.  Students have spent much of their time at TWU learning about ideas in a somewhat abstract way.  Before entering the world of professional employment, we want them to have the opportunity to take the excellent ideas that they have learned and put them into practice in an environment that prepares them for what they will quite possibly be doing for the rest of their lives.

The objective of this capstone program is to go through the entire process of developing a computer game from the conception of an original game idea, through design, implementation, composition of original music and art, to deployment and marketing. For this we require a multidisciplinary team of programmers, artists, writers, designers, marketers, musicians, testers, and project managers.

In this course, students will have the opportunity to experience the following:

1. Leadership in collaborative settings: this is an opportunity to do a project with other students rather than as individuals.  Group work projects in a typical class give some feeling of what it means to collaborate, but this will be a major project that requires effective teamwork, and effective teamwork requires self-motivated leadership.
2. Interdisciplinary work: most projects in life are not neatly segmented into different disciplines.  Working on a computer game will encourage students to look beyond the artificial barriers the academy puts up between different subjects.
3. Creating a finished, marketable product and piece of art: much university work has an unfinished feel to it—like the real stuff is yet to come.  This class provides the opportunity to leave TWU feeling that students have accomplished a significant, finished achievement.
4. Increasing marketable skills: this class will not be an automatic entrée into the established game industry, but it will provide students with demonstrable evidence that they have valuable skills that can contribute to many different kinds of careers (including those in the game industry!).  If they were interested in small business or independent media production, it would be hard for them to find a better class than this.
5. Critical self-examination: this class will be a perfect environment for students to gain a deeper understanding of their pragmatic abilities and their commitment to their worldview.  We wish to encourage regular self-evaluation, something that will hopefully be of great value as they leave TWU.
6. Integration of beliefs and work: the Christian worldview TWU has encouraged students to grow may have seemed abstract at times.  This project will require them to wrestle with the condition they will face for the rest of their careers: how do I put my beliefs into action? 

Instructors/Executive Producers

Students/Game Development Team

This is the last blogging I will be doing as a TWU student. Graduation weekend was a week ago and now I'm back in Bragg Creek, resting and up and deliberating on what's next. As always, my blogging output was less than I had hoped for - but with no complaints received I suppose there is nothing to apologize about. 

I was asked to make an address at the TWU Baccalaureate service, and below is the text. Should you still want to follow my blog you can, just at a new website. I'm moving shop to thomaswshunt.blogspot.com - hopefully see you there. 

Thanks and God's peace be with you,

Tom

Baccalaureate Service – Graduation Speech, April 29, 2011

My warm thanks for the honor of allowing me to speak this evening on how I have seen God working in my life.

Although I hope ‘I have eyes to see’ I cannot admit to having seen God’s work manifest itself in instances awe, grandeur, the miraculous or the transcendent. My four years here have had few mountaintops and little enrapture. Not a desert, but certainly dryness.

I have not witnessed the strong wind, the earthquake or the fire; but it is no worry, for as the Bible tells, “the Lord was not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire.” The low whisper of God is invisible. As is often his best work.

Too regularly have I forgotten this: the whisper, the invisible. I haven’t had the courage to wait upon the Lord. I found it easier to work with God, in the world than in myself.

It led me to measure my spiritual advancement by my material accomplishment - every success a blessing, every blessing a gift from God, and every gift a sign of God’s working in my life. But to quote the Imitation of Christ, “It is a wise lover who considers not so much the lover’s gift as the giver’s love.” Truly, I wait regularly for the gifts, but not for the giver.

God’s enabling me to do more – is not the same as God’s ennobling me. Similar to how Henry David Thoreau points out “while civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.”

Two events from my four years exhibit this.

In the span of one year, I spent a semester studying political theory at Oxford University, and then encountered political reality, as an intern in the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada. I was introduced to pathways of power and prestige, but without Jesus, they were without purpose.
It is to my great discredit that I have more gladly walked the halls of power and climbed the stairs of an ivory tower than walk humbly with God along the Road to Calvary.

I’ve fallen into the trap of speaking more to others about what God has allowed me to do in this world, than what God is himself doing and has done for the world, and the world to come. I witness to myself more than God.

Regularly I am reminded of the words “Jesus today has many lovers of His Heavenly Kingdom, but few of them carry his cross. Many follow Jesus up to the breaking of the bread, but few go on to the drinking of the chalice of his passion.”

T.S. Eliot writes in a poem “We shall not cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time.” Too late, however, is it to walk life’s many miles, and look back, only at the end, and see that what you bore was your own ambition, not your cross – both heavy loads – only one an easy burden.

The daily commute of the Christian is the way of the cross. I travel it infrequently and always imperfectly, but never without the Lord’s help. I have my Simon of Cyrene just as Jesus did - I have seen God working in my life in the ways in he has helped me carry my cross.

Being at a university, it isn’t a surprise that my Simon of Cyrene has taken the form of wisdom – of learning and theology – both in what I’ve learnt and from whom I’ve learned it. Faith without knowledge is like sight without perception. Love without knowledge is like a river without irrigation. Hope without knowledge is like walking without directions.

Though knowledge enhances faith, hope and love, Knowledge is not faith, hope or love. Though theology helps me know my cross, bare my cross and walk with it – theology is not my cross – theology is not my Christ. A saint once said, “I would rather experience repentance in my soul than know how to define it.” Too often I have been able to define faith while lacking the will to live it.

God speaks often in whispers, works with the invisible and promises what is not yet come. In a way, I’ve allowed him to work in me in so far as I’ve taken to heart what C.S. Lewis once wrote – that “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.”

After all, “Blessed are they who believe without seeing.” And truly, by believing, they see all the more.

Thank you.

Be Thou My Vision

About a month ago I had laser eye surgery and I’ve wanted to do a blog about it ever since. It’s an uncanny experience, which apart from the mild discomfort of a few highly complex procedures, was remarkably easy and efficacious. The novelty of being able to see anew is something that does ware off, save on a few occasions, but I hope the significance is never forgotten.

There have been a few instances, mostly in nature coming upon some scenic landscape, where I stumble upon an old memory of the same sight. It’s always the same: I recall having been there before, and having had taken off my glasses to try to see nature as I could naturally see it: gratefully but poorly. Now I have no need to do a double take: I can gratefully see – and see perfectly.

A few weeks ago I was walking around the Trinity Western pond and this very thing happened to me. Something new happened though. It struck me that there was a kind of vision which science and technology could not impart, a clarity that no procedure can produce. It is a form sight as valid as any, and even truer. There, by the still waters of the pond, with the faint droning of cars passing, and the more distant rumbling of a train approaching, the old hymn ‘Be Thou My Vision’ came to mind:

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

I asked myself, with some equivocation, “Do you I have eyes but do not see?”

With thanks for what I could see, and with prayers asking to see what I did not, I walked the rest of the pond trail, many times over repeating the supplication, “Lord, be thou my vision.”

Now at the end of my blog my thought seems to have come full circle. Writing this in the library is a fitting setting, as it’s here that I’ve realized that one of the great benefits of getting a Christian liberal arts education is that it equips students with new ways of thinking to match the new vision we receive from God.

Holistic education is a term often touted, and its said that our university education offers an approach that builds a whole person – I think that is true but subtly misleading. The city of God and city of man have different ideas of ideal students – of what it means to be a whole person: that is why Paul writes not of a whole Adam, but an old and a new one. This is, in most respects, related to the notion of worldviews. I suppose that all I wanted to get at is that Jesus presents a new-worldview, not simply a new worldview. Something I have cherished about TWU is that it includes in its curriculum old truths for new living. A different way to the view the world - a different world to view. As St. Paul Wrote in 2 Corinthians: 

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. ¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.

Four years after enrolling, I’m glad I came. 

Well, it certainly has been a long time. I haven’t blogged in months, though not without good reason, but nevertheless, I apologize. That said, I never got a flurry of emails requesting new blogs, so I can’t be sure who I am apologizing to, if anyone at all. But let sleeping dogs and inactive blogs lie. 

I spent the last semester in Ottawa, attending TWU’s Laurentian Leadership Center, and interned in the Prime Minister’s Office. For reasons of discretionary prudence my blog had to go inactive, which is part of the reason why I’ve been so silent over these past months. But I’m back now, though not for long. It happens to be my last semester here. I’m not sad it’s ending because it’s run a good course. I usually consider it to be poor sport to enjoy everything but the ending – like cherishing spring but not autumn, a flower’s blossoming but not wilting, a beginning and not an ending – I’ve found there is as much to learn about yourself in your last year of university as in your first. But enough of that let me fill you in on a few things.

After arriving home for Christmas I thought it would be a well-spent initiative to write down a few aphorisms regarding my impressions of the capital. These are all theoretical in nature, nor are they a reflection on those whom I worked with, as I have nothing but good things to say of them.

Here are a few of those already written:

-       A government’s most loyal opposition is time.

-       The price of participation in power is the participation in little else.

-       The Blackberry is a ball and chain; the news cycle an angry mob; the Internet a double agent.

-       Big government makes for little people.

-       Ask not what your country can do for you, but what your country shouldn’t do for you.

-       A government has no conscience of their own, only the consciences of many. 

I intend to take more advantage of this last semester with regard to blogging. I hope to write more regularly. There are only so many ‘lasts’ you get in life, and each one is indirectly a chance to prepare for the last ‘last’. A good ending is as good as a new beginning, and it is a shame not to afford one’s last semester as much reflection as the first semester received excitement and adventure.

I’ll leave you with a few good quotes and some extra thoughts I came upon during Christmas reading.

Enjoy.

“Glorious men are the scorn of wise men, the admiration of fools, the idols of parasites, and the slaves of their own vaunts.” – Francis Bacon

‘You have to make good what you cannot make different’

“Don’t trade liberty for security, as you may end up with neither.” Benjamin Franklin

‘Philosophy is the art of asking good questions and accepting long answers.’