Jerusalem and Athens Forum
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Essay Contest

Each year STILLPOINT and the Jerusalem and Athens Forum sponsor an essay contest open to all students in the program. Topics are chosen that challenge students to address an important current issue in light of reading and seminar discussions. A winner (•) and two honorable mentions are named each year.

2012 | Politics and its Limits in Christian Perspective
Taking their cue from standard thinkers from the JAF reading list--Plato, Augustine, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Weber, and others--students develop essays on the promise and peril of contemporary polotical engagement.


2011 | The Seven Deadly Sins
Taking their cue from Dante’s Purgatorio, students develop a broadly accessible essay on one of the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust.


2010 | LOVE AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 
Taking their cue from Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Caritas in Veritate,” students developed essays on the relationship between the virtue of love and the possibilities of human intelligence.

  • "Love and Attention" by Lindsey Reed '12
  • "Untitled" by Sarah Grimes '10
  • "V is Very, Very Extra-Ordinary" by Hilary Sherratt '12

2009 | IMAGO DEI: HUMAN DIGNITY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
Students considered how a Christian understanding of the Imago Dei can help us think well and wisely about the biotechnological age we are now entering.


2008 | WHAT DOES THE CITY OF GOD HAVE TO DO WITH THE CITY OF MAN?
Students submitted essays considering the age-old question of the relationship of the City of Man to the City of God (civitas Dei). Are we to be hypersojourners, aloof from the "powers and principalities" of this world? Or are we to be more deeply, "residentially" engaged, eager to endow human civilization itself with the sap of the gospel?

  • "Two Cities, Two Mindsets" by Lydia Sheldon '10
  • "Jerusalem and Athens of the North: Reflections on the Church in A.J. Gordon's Homeland" by Joshua Hasler '09
  • "On Cities and Churches" by Patrick Welsh '10

2007 | PONDERING PROGRESS
Students were invited to offer critical reflections on the concept of progress, and especially encouraged to consider how the Christian tradition and moral imagination might contribute to a Christian theology of progress. Students engaged with thinkers as various as George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Augustine of Hippo. 

  • "Recovering an Image of Progress," by Michael Tishel '08
  • "To Kill Time Is to Kill Life" by Bethany Joy Floch '08
  • "Progress as a Work of Redemption" by Joshua Hasler '09