Perry L. Glanzer

In my research on Christian higher education, I have found that one of the most important differences between Protestant and Catholic institutions pertains to their executive leadership teams.See for example two recent publications, Perry L. Glanzer, Theodore F. Cockle, Jessica Martin, and Scott Alexander, “Getting Rid of “Church-Related” Colleges and Universities: Applying a New Operationalizing…

A few years ago my oldest son took a required sociology course at Baylor for a general education class that introduced him to sociological theory. He found it uninteresting and irrelevant to his life. Indeed, surveys discover most students find general education uninteresting and irrelevant to their lives (for a review of the research see…

"Oh, Father tell me, do we get what we deserve? Whoa, we get what we deserve. And way down we go."                                                                     …

The sky is falling rhetoric tends to be overused when it comes to Christian higher education (CHE). This past month, one person tweeted upon learning that Trinity International University is discontinuing residential and in-person undergraduate education, “Christian higher ed is imploding.” This tweet was less reflective of empirical reality and more reflective of the struggles…

Baylor University recently published a land acknowledgment (LA). A few other Christian institutions and conferences have also created them (see for example here, here, and here). According to the Baylor University link, “A Land Acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many Native Nations and communities. Today, land acknowledgments are used by Native…

“Inspiration is for amateurs…the rest of us just show up and get to work.”Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 64. - Chuck Close Quite a bit has been written lately about the need for Christians to improve our imaginations, often labeled as Christian or moral imagination. For example,…

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. Col. 3:16 For Christians, most virtue words do not describe virtues unless they are directed properly. To put one’s faith,…

Not long ago, I overheard two seasoned flight attendants talk about flying into Houston, Texas, which one referred to as “the armpit of the United States.” I leaned over and asked if she had ever lived there. She said, “No, I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life”— (a case of “Californication” the Red Hot…

“Would I be doing this if I was not an assistant professor trying to get tenure?” I remember asking myself this question when trying on a Puritan costume. That week I was speaking about the Puritans and education, so I decided to rent a costume to spice up the co-taught class of over 100 students.…

This past year I enjoyed two extended visits with an old high school friend who had a profound spiritual influence on my life. This friend taught me tremendous lessons about intimacy, asking deep questions, listening, being aware of others’ needs, and forgiveness. She’s also female, and we dated at one point in high school. During…

I once had a young, female assistant professor come to me with a question. One of her young, male graduate students had asked an undergraduate female student in his class some questions about her dating life. The questions made the female student uncomfortable, so she talked to my colleague about it. My colleague then asked…

Having taken part in numerous Christian faculty or staff development conversations, I notice one key issue in these conversations: Christian educators have often absorbed a liberal democratic way of thinking about hospitality. As a result, they open themselves and their institutions to secularization since they practice the liberal democratic virtue of hospitality instead of the…

“ has been one of those places where we have told ourselves who we are.”Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum, A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1977), 1. —Frederick Rudolph One of the odd things about most forms of general education is how they fail to prepare students for…

Editor's Note: Due to the recent social media conversation about forgiving student debt, we thought it would be timely to reprint this earlier CSR blog post about this topic.  Thanks--PLG  “Just do it.” That was not the mantra of Nike being repeated in a recent Inside Higher Education article; it was the advice of a…

“…they want to hang on to different parts of religion that they find to be beneficial to their lives—but strictly on their terms.”Melinda Lundquist Denton and Richard Flory, Back Pocket God: Religion and Spirituality in the Lives of Emerging Adults (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 226. - Description of Emerging Adults When I met…

“Most social situations are not moral, because there is no conflict between the role-taking expectations of one person and another.”—Lawrence KohlbergLawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, Essays on Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 1:143. As mentioned in yesterday's post, early in the history of…

In 1765 two early presidents of American colonial colleges made their last ethical stands in the form of two published writings. In many respects, both writings maintained the counter-cultural elements that comprised the thinking of early Puritans. Neither author even mentioned Aristotle or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in these last works, the author and text that…

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”                         Matthew 6:1 I rarely see so many public intellectuals misunderstand the implications of a Supreme Court case as the recent Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision…

Take up the cause of the fatherless.Isaiah 1:17 America currently has the largest percentage of children raised without two parents in the world (23% compared to 7% for the rest of the world). We also have the highest-ever number of children living without fathers in America (same web source). Our children and society will experience the…