Perry L. Glanzer and Lesa Stern

Public speaking is one of the most common courses that one will find in the general education curriculum. Yet, we recently discovered that every Protestant university but six does not use a bit of Christian rhetoric when describing what they teach for that required class.In cases where the institution used a distribution model and allowed…

If your Christian university does not require a substantive class on nourishing an excellent Christian marriage, it is not engaged in a key factor behind upward economic mobility. Why do I say that? The social science evidence. As Melisa Kearney, a University of Maryland economist, and author of Two-Parent Privilege, shared on a recent podcast,…

“We Can’t Go On Together with Suspicious Minds”                         --Elvis Ever since the Fall, we have experienced gender division and alienation. Whether throughout human history we have improved or are going backward in this area, depends upon what one views as the end or…

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against…

American confidence in the “value” of higher education is plummeting. In 2015, 57% of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, but in 2023 that number fell to a mere 36%.Megan Brenan, “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply,” Gallup. 2023 July 11, https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx?version=print. What role might academics…

This virtue is not on any of the lists of character qualities for character education in public schools. One will also not find it on lists of virtues compiled by positive psychology scholars. Yet, it is perhaps one of the most important missing virtues among North American college students today. For example, Christian Smith found…

This virtue is not on any of the lists of character qualities for character education in public schools. One will also not find it on lists of virtues compiled by positive psychology scholars. Yet, it is perhaps one of the most important missing virtues among North American college students today. For example, Christian Smith found…

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…