What sort of person comes to mind when you think about the Board of Trustees of a theological school? Sure, schools like Claremont have members of the clergy, denominational leaders and committed laypeople who serve on the board. But Claremont also seeks out creative people who bring different skills and knowledge sets to the table. George Strawn is one of those people.
Especially since he helped create the Internet.
Dr. George O. Strawn is a member of the Claremont Board of Trustees and a United Methodist (so technically he fits into the “committed layperson” category). But he also is the Chief Information Officer of the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C.
In the 1980s he was director of the Iowa State University Computation Center which was involved in the creation of a regional computer network being coordinated by the National Science Foundation to share information among academics. One thing led to another, and he ended up working for the NSF and helped open the governmental and educational network for private use (such as buying books and emailing pictures of your kids). George now leads the information operation for the NSF, which essentially created the foundations for what we know today as the Internet.
You can read more about George’s involvement in developing the Internet, as well as a story about the 20th anniversary of the Internet on the NSF Website.
But I hope you take time to read the recent sermon he gave earlier this summer at his local church. He talks about the “big tent” of Methodism, his “big ideas” approaches, and his own “heady” approach to faith. He says, in part:
Throughout history, some people have tried to liberate us from religious mistakes of the past (for example, Martin Luther), and others have tried to conserve religious truths of the past (William Jennings Bryan comes to my mind, even though he was primarily a political figure). The first group is sometimes called liberals and the second conservatives. Both concerns are certainly worthy, even if we sometimes don't agree on which are the truths and which are the mistakes!
But there are other, perhaps better, ways to describe different types of Christians ...
Best of all, George is one of our trustees and is proving invaluable in leading Claremont down exciting new paths.
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