Perry L. Glanzer

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,…

"'God’s Image cut, or carved in Ebony,' was a phrase first used, we believe by the English Church Historian, Fuller …and assuredly this phrase is among the most striking of the graphic sentences which he stamped so deeply on the republic of letters. There it stands, this beautiful and appropriate piece of imagery, and there…

If you want to learn about the secular university’s pitiful justifications for general education, you simply need to read the recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Repairing General Education: Colleges Struggle to Answer the Question, ‘Why Am I Taking This Class?’” The author accurately writes, “Many students and more than a few professors see general…

Christian higher education currently neglects to teach students how to steward their bodies. How do I know? I recently led a mixed-methods study of Christian student affairs.Perry L. Glanzer et al., Christ-Enlivened Student Affairs: A Guide to Christian Thinking and Practice in the Field (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2020). In a national survey…

As mentioned in yesterday's post, my research undertaken with my graduate students has discovered that Christian graduate education is not very Christian. The marketing, objectives, and curriculum at two-thirds of programs show little sign of Christian influence. Our undergraduate programs may be different, but our graduate programs are really imitations of the secular programs from…

The Christ-Animated Learning blog recently ran a review of Mark Noll’s important book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind because it was recently reissued with a new preface and afterword. One of the original critiques Noll made concerned evangelical graduate education. He wrote in the original 1994 version, “Nowhere in the Western world is it…

“Are You Going to Go My Way?” Lenny Kravitz Dear Class of 2023, If there is a descriptor of the vice that older generations have perpetrated upon you at this moment, I would label it joylessness. Look at all the dystopian books you were fed growing up, The Hunger Games, Divergent, Mazerunner, Uglies, Matched, etc.…

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…