Perry L. Glanzer and Kevin D. Dougherty

In 2018, a group of us at Baylor helped start the Baylor Faith and Character Study (see here for more). We did so for a variety of reasons. First, we wanted to know the faith and character of our incoming students. As any good missiology or pedagogy course will teach you, you have to know…

Every Christian university requires at least one English composition, writing, and/or literature class. Thus, one would think that someone reviewing those course descriptions would find considerable evidence demonstrating how Christianity relates to these basic courses. You would be wrong. We recently analyzed the required gen ed course descriptions at all Protestant and Catholic universities that…

Since I still see people panic about Christian higher education every time the news emerges that a Christian college or university with less than 700 students closes, I thought it would be helpful to look at the bulk enrollment numbers again using the most recent 2021 total enrollment figures from the Digest of Education Statistics.…

I remember seeing the headlines and reading the stories while visiting relatives in Canada. In June of 2021, Sarah Beaulieu, an anthropologist who teaches at the University of the Fraser Valley, claimed to have found the graves of 215 Indigenous children at the site of a former Indigenous school in Kamloops British Columbia (later revised…

One virtue that briefly made headlines a few months ago is rarely discussed today. At least, I rarely hear of it talked about as a virtue or placed on lists of Christian or public virtues. Indeed, one of the intriguing things about moral language in the academy, whether in Christian or secular circles, is the…

This past year I wrote about the bodily stewardship crisis on Christian campuses. In a national survey of student affairs leaders, I noted that our research team asked them to rank sixteen themes they might emphasize on their campus. Educating students about stewardship of the body finished dead last. The second most neglected topic was…

Developing a theologically-informed vision of excellence about any topic, such as Christian higher education, requires not only serious theological and empirical study but also two other important things: 1. Studying the topic’s history; 2. Making international comparisons. Regarding the latter, one of the wonderful things about doing international research in Christian higher education is that…

Since it is an election year, I wondered if I could find evidence that Christian universities help their students contemplate excellent Christian citizenship. As mentioned in an earlier post, my research team examined the general education requirements at 231 Protestant colleges requiring at least one Bible or theology course. We chose these institutions because they showed…

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…