Perry L. Glanzer

I recently wrote about how God’s kindness is directed to those considered vulnerable or oppressed in society, such as widows, the fatherless, and those in bondage. As a result, in our efforts to imitate God’s kindness, Christians’ kindness should also be specifically directed to these groups. Yet, another theme in the Bible is that the…

Editor's Note: We apologize for the recent byline errors and broken links in our posts. Due to the transition associated with the tragic passing of our IT manager, we are experiencing some technical difficulties that we are working to resolve. Thanks for your patience. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior…

“It just wears you out being with nice people,” Stanley Hauerwas points out in a 2019 YouTube video. Having lived in the South most of his life, he likely knows this reality from experience. As Hauerwas did not describe the genesis of such feelings, I will suggest four reasons why this reality is the case.…

“Nice” is not an English word used in any serious Bible translation and “being nice” is certainly not a biblical virtue. Although its close cousin, kindness, is a Christian virtue, being nice is to Christian kindness what being empathetic is to Christian compassion. It is a partial secular substitute for the more robust Christian virtue…

“And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him . . . ‘the image of God,’ you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he…

I experienced my oddest graduate class discussion in a comparative ethics course at the University of Southern California. The class was taught by a visiting secular, feminist professor who was quite happy to let the discussion run free and wild. This particular class session was held at a conservative Jewish student’s home. In attendance, were…

During my academic career researching faith-based higher education in North America and around the world, I have received three types of emails. First, parents often write me with their questions about the confusing array of Christian colleges and universities. They are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they realize that unlike buying…

This past month, my wife and I had a Muslim Kazak family over for dinner. To show hospitality, we did not take down all of our Christian symbols in the house. In addition, we began the dinner as usual, with a prayer in Jesus’s name (I explained that as Christians this practice was our usual…

The past few weeks have taught us that we live in an age of moral and political confusion in academia. Administrators at elite universities do not know whether or how to offer moral clarity and wisdom about current events, such as the intentional targeting and butchering of civilians. Unfortunately, the general practice of public statements…

I can still remember when I first encountered someone with strong convictions about overpopulation and children. I was a graduate student attending an Evangelicals for Social Action initiative, funded by the Pew Foundation (before it secularized). The wonderful program created by Joel Carpenter paired Christian graduate students with Christian faculty for intellectual mentorship. I am…

The title of a study released this month explained its key findings, “The Rise of and Demand for Identity-Oriented Media Coverage.” In our Age of Identity, there is a greater proliferation of identity-oriented media coverage, which the authors of the study chalk up to greater demand. Thus, one of the challenges with the Age of…

In an earlier blog post, I reported that public higher education enrollment shrank -4% between 2010 and 2019. In comparison, religious institutions only shrank -0.1%. What happens when we add the year 2020? We find that public university enrollment shrank by an astounding -8.4% between the fall of 2010 and 2020. In contrast, religious institutions,…

I am going to start with a controversial claim. I believe the famous phrase, “faith seeking understanding” is the wrong phrase for Christian academics to use to describe Christian education. Instead, a more biblically faithful phrase should be faith seeking excellence (and then understanding). Allow me to explain why. Some time ago David Smith asked…

A friend of mine recently shared that when talking with his daughter about her classes at a Christian university, he found himself repeatedly asking, “Did you discuss any constructive proposals?” Her consistent answer was, “No, we really did not have time.  We had to spend so much time on deconstructing structures of ____________” (with "deconstructing…

Survey Q: How does the Christian faith inform your message about alcohol?Participant: “We don’t really have a message about alcohol, aside from ‘don’t do it’.” When I worked in public policy, I once spoke at a governor’s conference in North Dakota. After my talk, I struck up a conversation with the Lt. Governor. She made…

I am continually amazed at how provincial and specialized contemporary graduate education is. By provincial and specialized, I mean that there is usually little interdisciplinary conversation that takes place within the curricula. Unfortunately, Christianity graduate education, which has reasons to overcome disciplinary silos, fails to counter this culture. In fact, although Christian institutions are supposed…

In 1994 and 1995, I traveled to seventeen different cities in Russia and Ukraine to study a ground-breaking undertaking. Known as The CoMission, it was a vast partnership of Western mission groups, parachurch groups, and denominations that sought to educate former Soviet public educators who taught communist ethics on how to teach Christian ethics. It…

When visiting Australia this past year, I happened to catch a taxi ride with an Australian citizen from India who began asking about my religious background. That encounter led to a fascinating conversation about his own Christian experience. He converted to Christianity in India as a teenager and then sought to witness to a group…

“A man may have to die for his country, but no man must, in an exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.”…

In a recent blog post, I addressed the sloppy, alarmist reporting about the state of Christian higher education in the United States. The actual trajectory of religious higher education between 2010 and 2019 involved only minuscule decline (-0.1%) and that decline was much less than the -4% enrollment decline among secular universities. In other words,…