Graduate Christian Fellowship - Columbia University

04/14/2022

Picnic with other grad fellowships at Columbia on Sat, April 16th @ 1-3 pm at Sheep Meadow, Central Park

Sponsored by 5 grad ministries: GCF, Healthcare, Mandarin, MBA, & Social Work

09/29/2021

We’ve kicked off the Alpha Course on Wednesdays @ 7:30 pm!

Alpha is a respectful, friendly way to explore the big questions of life, faith and meaning. The interactive sessions include a short video that looks at a different question each week, followed by conversation. Alpha is run all around the globe, and everyone is welcome!

To receive the zoom link please email Joe Cina at [email protected]

06/18/2021

Historical Hon on Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

In honor of Juneteenth 2020, the Columbia Journalism School posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize to Ida B. Wells who passed away in 1931. Many consider her the first investigative journalist.

Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in 1862. She was the oldest child in her family. Tragedy struck her family in 1878. Her parents and an infant brother died of yellow fever. At only 16 years old, Ida courageously fought and kept her five younger siblings together by getting a job as a teacher to support them.

Later, she would give up teaching to become a journalist for a black newspaper. She would become known as the “Princess of the Press.”

Ida was a committed Christian and enjoyed leading Bible studies. In her diary, Ida often praised God. Here’s a journal entry that she wrote after a worship service: “I felt lifted up and I thank God I opened my mouth and told of His wonderful mercies to me and my heart overflowed with thankfulness.”

Ida was committed to seeing her marginalized community fight for dignity. In another journal entry, she wrote: “And if I did nothing, sacrificed nothing in return for all that has been done for me, I could not expect his blessing and sanction. Help me and bring success to my efforts I pray.”

In 1892, Ida’s good friend Thomas Moss and two other black men were lynched by a white mob. Ida knew that these three victims were upstanding citizens. This tragedy launched Ida on a campaign to fight against the evil practice of lynching.

Lynching consists of punishment and ex*****on conducted by an angry mob taking justice into their own hands. The most common form of lynching is hanging, but whites also executed blacks by shooting, castration, or flaying where the skin is slowly removed from the body.

Sadly, many whites who perpetrated this injustice called themselves Christians. Some lynchings were scheduled on Sunday afternoon after church. If you google the word “lynching,” you will see white women and children in some of the pictures near the hanging dead body.

The diminutive, five-feet Ida stood tall against the scourge of her day and heroically wrote Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Because of death threats, Ida left the South and moved to the North.

She delivered anti-lynching speeches throughout this country. She also traveled to England to encourage people to boycott and put economic pressure on the South. The number 1 export of the South was cotton. Her efforts led to a decrease in British investment in the South.

Unfortunately, the cases of lynching continued into the 20th century, but they never reached the same high numbers that occurred in the 1890s and before. Ida played a decisive role because of her prophetic gift and tenacity.

In 1895, Ida married attorney and journalist Ferdinand Barnett at Bethel AME Church and settled in Chicago. She hyphenated her last name to Wells-Barnett, an unusual move at that time. Ferdinand appreciated his wife’s intellect and gifts, supporting her activism.

They had four children. Ida always juggled family life and career, even when she was single and supporting her younger siblings. She fought tirelessly for justice until her death at age 68.

02/15/2021

02/13/2021

Repost from

GCF, or Graduate Christian Fellowship is a spiritual— and now, virtual— home for students and alumni, alike. And whether you are a budding inquisitor or a seasoned saint, there is a place for you here. GCF’s members study and work in vastly different disciplines, are from many different walks of life and hail from different corners of the globe. Each Friday (from 8-9:15pm) the Fellowship convenes to discuss a passage of biblical text, relying on the unique perspectives of this truly interdisciplinary group to unpack its meaning and application in our lives and to the praise of God's glory. See link in our bio for Zoom info to join us!

02/12/2021

How to find Mr. Right? (Happy Valentine’s Day!)
By Hermeneutical Hon

The Bible is “a story about how God was seeking a bride for his son,” says David Pawson. The Bible is the longest and greatest love letter in history.

The “marriage” motif is a significant thread from John 2-4. In John 2, Jesus kicks off his public ministry at a wedding in Cana by performing his first miraculous sign of changing water into wine. Wine in the Old Testament is a symbol of joy and abundance. Jesus invites his followers into a joyous celebration.

Later in the Gospels, Jesus announces that wine is the symbol of his blood. He would be “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

In John 3, John the Baptist explains his role as a messenger of the Messiah:

29 The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. 30 He must become greater; I must become less.”

Johnny B is the wingman and the best man who points to the groovy bridegroom (Hey, I’m a product of the 60s and 70s).

John 4:4 states that Jesus “had to go through Samaria." Jesus stops at Jacob's well and sends his disciples into town to buy food. It doesn’t take 12 guys to buy lunch for 13. Simply, Jesus doesn’t want them around. Then a Samaritan woman comes to the well.

In the Old Testament, some of the patriarchs met their wives at a well, e.g., Jacob met Rachel and Moses met his future wife. The scene in John 4 is setting up for a "marriage."

Jesus asks the Samaritan woman to call her husband. But she expresses that she had no husband. Jesus knows that she had five husbands and she currently lives with a man who is not her husband.

Five husbands and one man make six. In this narrative, Jesus becomes the seventh man to woo her. The number seven in the Bible is the number of completion or perfection.

A traditional interpretation is that the Samaritan was a loose woman in explaining her multiple marriages. But only a man could give approval for a divorce at that time. Another explanation for the myriad of marriages is that the men used and discarded her.

Jesus will not mistreat or exploit her. He is the only man who can offer her true love, satisfaction, and fulfillment:

13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Jesus is the Bridegroom, and the church is his Bride.

11/20/2020

Historical Hon on the First Thanksgiving 1621
Eel & Turnips: An Authentic Thanksgiving Meal!!!

Every food we associate with the traditional Thanksgiving dinner was not on the menu of the first Thanksgiving in 1621, according to historian R. Tracy McKenzie.

The Pilgrims probably didn’t eat turkey. Wild turkey ran quickly. The primitive firearm called the musket was long, heavy, and required lighting a fuse to discharge a shot. The Pilgrims wouldn’t want to waste ammunition shooting a moving target when they can shoot “sitting ducks.” Ducks and geese were plentiful in the lakes surrounding the Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims could mount their muskets on tripods and blast away at stationary targets. In those lakes, the Pilgrims could easily catch eel which they found yummy.

The Pilgrims didn’t bake pumpkin pie since they didn’t have ovens. They didn’t have sugar so they couldn’t make cranberry sauce. They wouldn’t have eaten sweet potato since the Pilgrims consider it to be an aphrodisiac!

According to McKenzie in his book, The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tell Us About Loving God and Learning from History (IVP), our image of the traditional Thanksgiving meal developed from the imagination of Jane Austin, not the famous English novelist, but a middle-aged American housewife who wrote a historical romance novel in 1889 titled Standish of Standish. In 1897, the Ladies’ Home Journal published Austin’s description of the first Thanksgiving meal as a historical fact with a picture of Pilgrims wearing black suits and pointy hats. According to McKenzie, the Pilgrims actually like wearing bright suits.

Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863 to focus on the “the gracious gifts of the Most High God” during the national crisis and trial of the Civil War. Lincoln made no mention of the Pilgrims or a past historical event as a basis for the holiday. It is not until 1939 when Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first president to connect the Pilgrims with Thanksgiving. FDR also moved Thanksgiving a week earlier to extend the Christmas shopping season in order to boost the economy.

In the 19th century, Thanksgiving was not widely celebrated since Southerners viewed it as a Yankee holiday. It didn’t become popular in the South until the emergence of football in the 1890s. Thanksgiving moved from the church to the home to the gridiron. Worship services drastically decreased as the popularity of football increased. And the turkey would reign supreme.

Tracy McKenzie’s book not only debunked the myths of Thanksgiving but also demonstrated one of the four commitments of InterVarsity’s Graduate & Faculty Ministries (GFM), namely the integration of faith and work. McKenzie is a follower of Jesus and chair of the history department at Wheaton College. His recent IVP book is titled A Little Book for New Historians: Why and How to Study History. He offers an example of thinking Christianly and historically. Put another way, he engages in critical investigation and Christian reflection.

He frowns upon the approach of history as ammunition. Looking to the past, these folks create a historical narrative in their own image supplying firepower to their arguments. They are seeking evidence to justify their current agenda. McKenzie doesn’t think these folks learn from history but may actually commit idolatry by imputing authority to historical figures that God has not conferred.

He advocates an approach of history as illumination seeking to learn the real story. The real story can actually be more interesting than the fictitious one. The Christian scholar should have an open mind and seek to discover what happened instead of what they hope happened.

McKenzie also encourages moral reflection instead of moral judgment. The latter is outward focusing on evaluating the behavior of others in the past or present, and the former is inward focusing on evaluating one’s own behavior. Moral reflection is a humble and vulnerable endeavor of opening one’s worldview to the hard questions of our predecessors and to learn from them what we need to learn.

10/05/2020

‼️Register for our virtual grad retreat today! The cost of the retreat will increase from $15 to $20 after today!! See link below for more details and registration.

https://www.nycgradintervarsity.org/grad-fall-retreat.html

Reposted from

09/26/2020

Registration is open for our (virtual) fall retreat! Details here:

Northeast GFM Grad Fall Retreat Information

09/18/2020

Reposted from
Save the date! Our fall retreat this semester will be virtual. More info will be made available on our website soon so be sure to come back and check it out.

09/12/2020

Repost from
Welcome to our graduate student for Metro NYC area! Our Graduate Christian Fellowship provide spaces for graduate students, post-docs, fellows and faculty to encounter God, grow in friendships and community, and learn more about how the Christian faith is relevant to every aspect of our lives, including our studies and professions.

To know more about our ministry, follow us here and check our our website (link in bio) to connect with us!

08/29/2020

Historical Hon on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When you have a writer’s block struggling to compose coherent ideas on your computer, imagine if you have to do that research paper, thesis, or the “little paper” called the dissertation without a computer, internet, or even paper & pen. Imagine also you must “write” while doing menial, hard labor. You must compose and remember everything in your head. You may think that it can’t be done.

But that’s how the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) composed about 12,000 lines and hundreds of virtual pages from 1945-1953 as a political prisoner in the labor camp system of the Soviet Union.

As grad students or alumni of Columbia or other universities, we have experienced more difficulties now than life before COVID-19. However, in the immortal opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities echoing the Book of Ecclesiastes, Charles Dickens wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...” The “best of times” in most of human history would be comparatively the “worst of times” for us now even during this pandemic. Imagine life without antibiotics, anesthesia, electricity, air conditioning, central heating, and all our tech toys.

Imagine experiencing tragedy (death of a father), enduring poverty & the cold Russian winters with inadequate heat and no indoor plumping & toilet, enrolling in two universities & studying for two degrees simultaneously with constant sleep deprivation (Solzhenitsyn wanted to study literature and become a writer, but he wanted to find a job so he also studied physics & mathematics.), fighting the invading N**i German army, losing a beloved mother in her late-40s to tuberculosis during the war, opposing an evil government (Stalinist Regime), and getting cancer while in the Soviet Gulag. Talk about a tough life!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn experienced all those difficulties. But he still gave up atheism and came to faith in Christ at age 33 when he thought he would die in 1952 and never have any of his writings published. Dr. Boris Kornfeld shared with him about his conversion from Judaism to Christianity, and a dying fellow prisoner Boris Gammerov witnessed to Solzhenitsyn. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote:

It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.... That is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!” I...have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

By God’s grace, Solzhenitsyn survived the Gulag and became a prolific renowned writer winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and the Templeton Prize (unofficial “Nobel Prize” in the intersection of religion & science with a cash award exceeding the Nobel Prizes) in 1983. Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 at the beginning of the Russian Revolution. He is credited as a major influence on the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991 not by the power of an invading army but by the power of truth. Solzhenitsyn believed the words of Jesus: “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32)

*[The 2020 Templeton Prize recipient is Francis Collins, M.D./Ph.D., a follower of Jesus and the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) overseeing the government’s efforts to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 and supervising Dr. Anthony Fauci.]