An Interview with Dr. Ron Jenkins
By Janine C. Hagan
Dr. Ron Jenkins is Professor of Biology at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. Ron is a member, elder, Adult Sunday School Teacher, and Adult Bible study leader at Edgewood Presbyterian Church.

Janine: Ron, tell us about your work at Samford University. What is your particular position, and what are your interests and specialties?

Ron: I am a tenured full professor. I have been there for 15 years. I teach biology. I teach a number of different classes. This year has been new for me, as I have stepped down from being the chair of the department, which I have been for the last nine years. Now I have a lot more time being a biologist, which is what I love to do. All biology majors, when they come in, have to take my class. I teach Biology Foundations, Cell Molecular Biology and Animal Biology

I also teach anatomy. One of my favorites is doing field courses. I teach Vertebrate Field Zoology and Invertebrate Field Zoology. There, we just walk around half the time outside collecting and photographing. We have just gotten a paper published in the Science Journal just on how we teach our field biology. We don't kill anything. We photograph everything. We can get right on the little fishes and salamanders and whatever and photograph them and we teach by that. I also teach anatomy…cats and cadavers and such.

Another one of my favorite classes is called Environmental Ethics, which is a graduate course in which we go through all the basic ethical theory and we try to apply that to the environment. These are going to be decision makers. They are working on a master's degree in Environmental Management and I think it's important that they have some sort of ethics course.

I kind of get off onto philosophy in all of my classes. It doesn't matter what level. I think that biology impacts all other disciplines, no discipline is separate. So, when you are a biologist you also have to be a sociologist and a theologian and a philosopher and a psychologist. And you have to know history and how to be able to write. Biology is very much a component of everything. I am convinced of that.

At the university, we have started something that we practiced last year. Our biology majors, the same students taking a biology class also take their history and their literature classes together. It's what we call Learning Communities. I am in charge of that at Samford. I am trying to get our biology majors to think outside of that little biology-box. I want our biology teachers to be teaching more of writing, history, and literature as well as our writing teachers to be teaching more biology, etc. Our president liked that so much that now we have learning communities for all undeclared students. For students who don't know what they want to major in, they will study as a group when they first get to Samford and get to know each other very, very well.

Janine: That's a great model. It's almost a "one room schoolhouse," basically a very inter-disciplinary model. I like that a lot. Can you share some of your faith background and faith history with us?

Ron: I grew up as a Southern Baptist (Christian) in Decatur, Georgia. My parents are very strong Southern Baptist. When I went off to college, I really had a lot of questions about religion. I went to a small Baptist college in Tennessee. My religion and philosophy teachers created a lot of questions in me about the accuracy of the Bible and the literacy of the Bible, and how close should our thinking be according to the descriptions in the Bible? In my science classes of course, Genesis 1 and 2 were just not accurate. I had to kind of think through all this. I had a lot of doubts in my college years. I never really went to church…even all through my master's and PhD program, during all of school. I was not a "church go-er."

When I moved to Birmingham my mother threatened me saying "You're going to have children and you're going to want to bring them up in church." So we started looking around. Edgewood Presbyterian was just down the street and had about 50 members at that time and that's where I wanted to go. I didn't know much about the Presbyterian Church as a denomination. I didn't really care; I just wanted to go to church. I didn't want to go to a big church even though I grew up in a Baptist church.

And so we joined this church when our son was born in 1985 and been here ever since. That's 18 years.

Janine: How has your faith history or your background affected your professional life?

Ron: I am not a religious person. I think that I am very pragmatic. I might say that while I am also a scientist, and I believe in science, I also believe in God, but I am not religious about that. I believe that Jesus the Christ is the son of God, but I am not very religious about that either.

Janine: You are more "spiritually" inclined?

Ron: Yes. A lot of people tell me you cannot do science and religion at the same time. I insist that you have to. You only live in this one world. You have to do it all at one time. You can't do just religion. You can't do just science. You have to do it all at the same time. You have to figure out in your own head what that reality is…and where God is part of that. When I do religion I do science. When I do science I am also doing religion.

I think that my students at Samford University appreciate that. There are many science professors at other schools that don't talk about religion at all. But I kind of blend it in…. I even get off into discussions with my students when we're talking about spiders, or the colorful darters in Alabama. You can always get off into the spiritual component of that. That's probably why I am still at Samford. I can still blend religion into all my science teaching.

Janine: What kind thoughts do you have about Sabbath, or renewal?

Ron: Well, Sabbath is a day of rest…it comes out of Genesis when God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh day. It is religious; right out of our Judeo-Christian background. As you go back to the Hebrew people and the instructions they were given, every seventh week there is to be a rest and every seventh year there is to be a rest. And even Jubilee. It's kind of interesting that when the Hebrew people took the Sabbath "off"….so did their servants, and their animals and everything else. As you go back and read that in Exodus and Leviticus, the purpose of that was to let the land and everything rest. The Sabbath applies to all of God's creation. You have to ask yourself when you are instructed to rest on the Sabbath, what are you really supposed to be doing?

We should look at that. I think that it's a time to not be involved in your job. If you are a farmer, it is a time to not be a farmer. If you are a biology professor, it is time to not be a biology professor. Everybody needs that one day a week, it is time to not be what you are doing the rest of the week. I think that what the Hebrew people were instructed was not just to worship God but to not be their same materialistic selves. To rest from materialism. A biology professor can go paint his house and not be a biology professor all seven days. In manual labor I can actually do some pretty good praying. I think about what God has graced us with… I don't think of Sabbath as a rest from physical work making a living, but a time to rest from that and think about other things; to think about the goodness of life.

Janine: (with laughter!) I was going to ask you about the challenges of Sabbath….but I think that/those are the challenges. That is the challenge. Those are the challenges, to make that time!

Ron: I think if you do one thing and do it all the time, then that can become very mundane and very boring. Take a person who is perhaps a very good physician and they are in that position every day of their life and they never take a break from it. They could become such a narrow, narrow, person. The Sabbath is to give you that opportunity to not be that way. Sabbath lets us soul-search. I think that we often don't soul- search enough. People may take a Sunday and they use that to go to church and they can't wait to get out, go to lunch, rush home to do all this other "stuff." But the Sabbath is to do some soul-searching and not be thinking about all the routines of life. You need to get away from that. Really, if you can truly rest on that one day a week, it makes you a lot more efficient on the other six days. It is just brain rest, mental health And Is it religious? It should be. Because, I think in soul-searching that the final answers ultimately come to God. Everything does; come to the identity of God, regardless of your religion.

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