Dr. Megan Morton, a professor of English at Geneva College, likes to give her students food for thought. Literally and figuratively. Nothing is off the menu.

“One of my interests in life is food,” she says, adding that the same is true for our culture at large. Because of that interest, and because the Bible itself has a lot to say about food, Morton has made food the theme of her English 101 class at Geneva.

“I wanted a topic that was universal and would also let us apply Christian thinking to contemporary problems,” says Dr. Morton.

The class reads articles by Christian and non-Christian authors on a wide range of issues, from overeating to the ethical treatment of animals. Morton challenges her students to reevaluate the perspectives they bring to each issue. Are their judgments based on personal experience or political views, or are they approaching each question by first asking, What does the Bible say about this? In what ways is this contradictory to a Christian world view?

“I’ve found that students haven’t necessarily thought about these things, and I love that together we can think about how to follow the command that ‘whether you eat or drink or what ever you do, do it all for the glory of God,’” (1 Cor. 10:31) she says.

This is the point Morton really drives home with her students. If God commands us even to eat and to drink for His glory, then that means everything we do has an eternal impact and a higher purpose.

In addition to her writing classes, Morton also teaches a survey of American literature before the Civil War. She and her students recently studied the work of several Puritan poets. Geneva students have really enjoyed studying the Puritans because of the Puritans’ unique ability to face the earthiness of life in the light of God’s truth.

“I love studying the Puritans, because these are people who served a living God and a living King, who really thought about Christ enthroned in heaven and tried to put that into practice in daily life,” Morton says.

Not surprisingly, one of Morton’s favorite Puritan poems has to do with food. Minister Edward Taylor (c. 1642–1729) never published his poetry but wrote it for himself as a means of meditation before the Lord’s supper each month. In “Meditation 8” he reflects on John 6:51, using tangible imagery to illustrate the beauty of God’s sacrificial love in sending His only Son to be our living Bread.

Did God mold up this Bread in Heaven, and bake, Which from His Table came, and to thine goeth? Doth He bespeak thee thus, This Soul Bread take. Come Eat thy fill of this thy God’s White Loaf? It’s Food too fine for Angels, yet come, take And Eat thy fill. It’s Heaven’s Sugar Cake.

“When you read the Puritans, it helps you think about what’s eternal. It’s fun because some of my students really love Christ and are looking forward to that, but also because some people might not know it and get to hear about the living hope that belongs to those who know Christ.”

“One student drew hearts around this poem,” she adds with a smile. “She’s a student that’s been quiet all semester, and she said it was like she had an ‘aha’ moment in reading literature.” Morton’s own “aha” moment came when she was in graduate school at Purdue University. In the second semester of her first year, she had a friend who wasn’t afraid to ask her tough questions.

“‘Why do you believe this?’ ‘What’s the foundation of that?’ He was always pushing me,” she says. “And in the meantime the Lord was moving. I had been increasingly feeling the weight of my sins. I felt guilty, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t want to go to confession because I was ashamed about my sins and I didn’t want to tell a priest about them. That’s when he and some other people told me to read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.”

Morton read it, and, to her surprise, it made sense. She and her friends started getting together to discuss it. Then one of their close friends from graduate school committed suicide. That tragedy gave birth to even more conversation—about the sovereignty of God and His ultimate goodness even in the midst of pain.

“These people I was meeting with were Reformed, so when they told me about things like God’s sovereign election and our deadness in sin until God awakens us and transforms us, that was so believable to me,” she says. “I had never had any interest in spiritual things, and all of a sudden I was reading the Bible and feeling the heaviness of my sin. And so after a little while of reading the Bible and praying, I realized that I needed to confess my sins to God. It was only through Christ that I could have forgiveness and that I could be pleasing to the Lord.”

At the invitation of one of her graduate school friends, she started worshipping with the Lafayette Reformed Presbyterian Church. She was baptized in May 2004. “And I love singing the Psalms!” she says.

Morton met her husband, Jonathan, at the Great Lakes–Gulf Presbytery’s summer family camp, Covfamikoi, in summer 2006. They started talking over the phone in December and were married a year later. They lived in Lafayette while they both finished graduate school programs, and Morton began searching for a teaching position in fall 2008.

“The way the academic job market works is there’s a national list of jobs in your field and you apply to every school that has a job opening,” she says.

Out of all the schools she applied to, only one was located near an RP church. Then Morton got an email from Dr. Paul Kilpatrick in Geneva’s English department. She came to campus for an interview the following week, and immediately knew that this was where she wanted to be.

“I came here and thought, This is the kind of place I would want to come to as a student,” she says. “This is the kind of place where seeds are planted and where people are transformed.”

She heard firsthand stories of this transformation as members of Geneva’s faculty and personnel committee testified that this was a place where, as students, they had heard the gospel for the first time. And Morton could sense the faculty’s genuine interest in her Christian commitment.

“I talked about things like the challenges of integrating faith in my subject, and people listened attentively and understood what I was talking about,” she says. “I felt like it was a place where vibrant conversations about faith and what it really means for life were happening.”

Morton believes that through these vibrant conversations, Geneva challenges students to examine everything—from food to early American poetry—in light of eternity. In the same way, they are encouraged to approach every aspect of their own vocations as acts of service to God.

“That’s a way of thinking that you start in college and continue for the rest of your life,” she says. “I also think it could combat the anti-intellectualism in the evangelical world in general. Learning to think of your vocation as service to God lets you know that thinking is glorifying to God.”

Morton explains that thinking for God’s glory empowers students to counter a common falsehood—that in order to be true intellectuals, they must be free from any kind of belief system.

“The world says that if you believe in God and you believe in the Bible, there’s a ceiling, and instead of being a thinker out underneath the wide open sky, you’re a thinker in a tiny little room,” she says. “But, in fact, being a Christian means that you should be constantly wrestling with the eternal, and that through prayer and through the Scriptures, you have access to a mind vast and infinite and much greater than your own.

“Coming to know God is such a vaster enterprise than just sitting around twiddling your thumbs and asking pointless questions. Thinking as a way to try to engage the daily world, the ordinary world of our lives in light of the reality of eternity, is an amazing act of intellectual work.”

—Jenny (Bower) Pichura graduated from Geneva College in 2005 and now works in the public relations office. She and her husband, Mike, are members of the College Hill (Beaver Falls, Pa.) RPC.