Fall 2020 Newsletter of the Christian Engineering Society

A Note from CES President and the Postponement of 2021 CES Annual Meeting

by Bill Jordan (Bill_Jordan@baylor.edu)

On behalf of the Board of the Christian Engineering Society, I would like to welcome you to our group. We are a relatively young group, founded in 2016. However, as an informal group, we have been around for some time.

An informal group first began the Christian Engineering Education Conference in 1992. We have held that conference approximately every other year since then. In an effort to broaden our appeal to practicing engineers, we changed the name slightly in 2013 to the Christian Engineering Conference. While many of our presentations are about engineering education, we want to make our group relevant to the many practicing Christian engineers.

In order to sustain our work we decided to formally organize into the Christian Engineering Society in 2016. We owe a great deal to our founding President Dr. Steve VanderLeest. At our Board meeting in July, Dr. VanderLeest indicated a desire to step down as President. I was one of the founding officers of the society and was elected by the Board to be its President for 2020-2022. I look forward to working with all of you to further the cause of Christian faith inspired engineering.

There is one major news item I wanted to tell you about. We were planning on having our 2021 meeting be a joint meeting with the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences. We were to meet in southern California just before the 2021 ASEE meeting. With many issues caused by the pandemic, they decided to cancel their conference. The CES Board met to discuss our situation. We faced many of the same issues that they did. We also agreed that it would be prudent to postpone our conference until 2022. In 2022 the ASEE meets in Minneapolis on June 26-29, 2022. We plan on having our conference immediately following at a nearby Christian University (exact site still to be worked out). Following our usual two year pattern, this would mean the following conference would be in June 2024 near Portland, Oregon.

Since we will not all meet in summer 2021, we are considering a number of things, including having some on-line plenary type presentations to help us stay connected. We are also working on the final details of an on-line journal for society. The problems caused by the pandemic have slowed us down a little bit. We still hope to have it accepting proposed journal articles before the calendar 2020 is over.

"Being a Christian in Engineering"

"Engineering is an excellent subject to study as a Christian, but it is not without its challenges. Perhaps the greatest of these is the apparent irrelevance of religious faith to the physical world–a myth perpetuated by atheists and by some Christians who emphasise the division between the body and the soul, the physical and the spiritual. This leaflet aims to encourage you in your calling as an engineer and provide some advice on dealing with common challenges associated with being a Christian in engineering." Click here to continue reading this article by Glyn Spencer and Mike Clifford in UK.

Responding to the Pandemic (National Academy of Engineering)

"The effectiveness of the nation’s and world’s responses to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recovery of both our economy and social well-being, will depend on the talent of scientists, engineers, and medical professionals." Click here to continue reading. 

Job Postings and CES LinkedIn/Facebook Page

by Ted Song (tsong@jbu.edu)

Don't forget to check the Resources & Career page for job postings, and the following 

• • Facebook Christian Engineering group

  • LinkedIn Christian Engineering group

Newsletter Sign Up and Article Contributions

This newsletter is a publication of the Christian Engineering Society, distributed no more than once per month. You can sign up to receive an email notification when a new newsletter is available. Ted Song of John Brown University is the moderator and editor of the newsletter. Sometimes email filters will block mass distributions like the newsletter announcement, so be sure you whitelist the address "ces-announce@calvin.edu" to allow the newsletter announcement to get through. If you have questions about the newsletter, send an email to Ted at tsong@jbu.edu. Additionally, if there is a project or activity at your institution/organization that relates engineering with faith, missions and/or service, we’d like to include it in a future CES newsletter. Society members are always encouraged to submit announcements and contribute articles! (Editor reserves the right to make the final decision on inclusion of all content.) CES also welcome members to contribute articles or suggest new books to be added to this growing body of literature. If you are interested, please contact the CES resource curator Dr. David Che at ched2@asme.org.