President’s Speaker Series

Scott Finnie, PhD, has been a faculty member in Eastern Washington University’s Africana Education Program and history department since 1992 and currently serves as director of Africana studies and as director of race and cultural studies. He has made more than 40 presentations worldwide in the last 10 years, including visits to Oxford in England, Mexico City, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego, Sao Paulo, and Honolulu. His presentations have covered themes surrounding civil rights, affirmative action, servant leadership, diversity and cross-cultural communication, the American criminal justice system, and faculty hiring in higher education.

In addition, he has published a dozen articles in numerous publications, including The National Social Science Journal, Investigating Diversity: Race, Ethnicity and Beyond, The Oxford Round Table Journal, The Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly, and The International Journal of Servant Leadership.

View the event recording

People today are not asking, "Is Christianity true?" They're asking, "Why are Christians such bigots?" Nancy Pearcey, professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University, takes on the headline issues of our day: abortion, assisted suicide, homosexuality, transgenderism, and the hook-up culture. She shows that we will be much more effective if we dig down to the worldview level. The secular ethic rests on a radically dehumanizing worldview that denigrates the body and demeans the person. By contrast, Pearcey shows how to craft the biblical ethic in a way that is more positive and more appealing than the secular ethic.

Pearcey is the author of Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Her earlier books include The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and two ECPA Gold Medallion Award Winners: How Now Shall We Live (coauthored with Harold Fickett and Chuck Colson) and Total Truth. Her books have been translated into eight languages.

She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University. A former agnostic, Pearcey has spoken at universities such as Princeton, Stanford, USC, and Dartmouth. She was highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today and was hailed in The Economist as "America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."

Dr. Paul D. Miller is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He serves as co-chair of the Global Politics and Security concentration in the Master of Science in Foreign Service program.

He is a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, a visiting professor with the American Enterprise Institute’s Initiative on Faith and Public Life, and a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Dr. Miller spent a decade in public service as Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff, an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, and a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.

Dr. Miller writes widely on international affairs, political theory, religion and public life, and film and culture. His most recent book, Just War and Ordered Liberty, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. His next book, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong With Christian Nationalism, is forthcoming from InterVarsity Academic Press in 2022.

Joseph Pearce is Senior Editor at the Augustine Institute, 

Giboney has served as a delegate for the Democratic National Convention and as the co-chair of Obama for America's Gen44-Atlanta initiative. Together with Michael Wear and Chris Butler, Giboney published Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign's Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement .

Giboney addresses the George Fox community about being a faithful Christian witness and all that entails. Watch video

George Fox University provost Andrea Scott dives into an interview with Antipas Harris, author of Is Christianity the White Man's Religion?: How the Bible Is Good News for People of Color. Follow along as they tackle the book's themes and discuss its takeaways.

This fall, every employee is reading the book and engaged in discussions around it as part of George Fox's commitment to initiatives and programs surrounding diversity and change in our university. Watch video

Sunggu Yang joined George Fox’s College of Christian Studies in 2017 as an assistant professor of Christian ministries. Before his arrival, Yang served as the Louisville Institute’s Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, where he taught courses ranging from homiletics and worship to prophetic ministry. One of his innovative courses was “Film & Preaching: The Gospel According to Hollywood.”

Yang is the author of two books, King’s Speech: Preaching Reconciliation in a World of Violence and Chasm (2019) and Evangelical Pilgrims from the East: Faith Fundamentals of Korean American Protestant Diasporas (2016), and two books that are in progress, Picasso and Preaching: An Aesthetic Homiletic for the 21st Century and Sacred Waters: Pastoral Essays for Aspiring Preachers.

Ordained by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Yang has preached at various venues around the nation. He holds a PhD in religion from Vanderbilt University (2015), a master’s degree in liturgical studies from Yale Divinity School (2010), an MDiv from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University (2009), and a bachelor’s degree in theology from the College of Theology at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. He lives in Sherwood with his wife, Rebecca Jeong, and their daughter, Stella.

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, spoke on balancing work, family and faith. VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, and a recent article on VMware in Forbes described the company this way: “It’s not an exaggeration to say that VMware stands at the center of the IT universe. The company’s software touches nearly every element of modern IT architecture.” VMware employs more than 24,000 employees and revenue for fiscal 2018 was nearly $9 billion.

Gelsinger brings almost 40 years of technology and leadership experience. Since coming to VMware in 2012, he has doubled the size of VMware, which software powers the world’s complex digital infrastructure. The company’s compute, cloud, mobility, networking, and security offerings provide a dynamic and efficient digital foundation to over 500,000 customers globally, aided by an ecosystem of 75,000 partners. Based on his efforts, Fortune Magazine named Gelsinger one of its top “Businesspersons of the Year” in 2018.

Prior to joining VMware, Gelsinger was president and chief operating officer of EMC’s Infrastructure and Products Group. There, he was responsible for all of EMC’s products – including storage, data analytics, security, management and data protection products, analytics, and the large majority of EMC’s revenue.