Episode 22: Faith and the University with Arend Poelarends, PhD

This episode first Streamed Live on March 26th, 2023 here: https://youtube.com/live/OrBu21F_CJw

Voices in the Wilderness welcomes Arend J.T. Poelarends, PhD, to talk about the integration of faith in the University. Arend is the director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Anselm House, a Christian study center at the University of Minnesota, where he leads the university engagement initiatives, inviting speakers to campus to engage the various disciplines with the Christian intellectual tradition. Dr. Poelarends organizes university roundtables about the big questions, and comes alongside Christian faculty to support them in integrating their faith with their work. Arend J. T. Poelarends, PhD is the director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Anselm House, a Christian study center at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD in Astrophysics from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he studied the pre-supernova evolution of stars that are about 10 times as massive as our sun. He continued his education at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, where he obtained an MDiv, after which he taught for 11 years in the physics and engineering department at Wheaton College (IL) and co-directed the Wheaton College Science Station, a field station in the Black Hills in South Dakota. His research at Wheaton focused on modeling the evolution of a particular class of binary stars, describing the conditions that would lead to the formation of double neutron stars and which form the progenitors of gravitational wave sources. Since the summer of 2022, he is associated with Anselm House, where he leads the university engagement initiatives, inviting speakers to campus to engage the various disciplines with the Christian intellectual tradition, organizing university roundtables about the big questions, and coming alongside Christian faculty to support them in integrating their faith with their work.