Perry L. Glanzer

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…

Currently, there is some discussion at Baylor University about considering “empathy” as an ideal character strength for undergraduate students. That discussion made me wonder why we talk about empathy as a virtue in Christian circles. After all, it is not a biblical word (of course that does not mean it is not a Christian virtue).…

Sometimes it is interesting to take stock of the field of Christian higher education.  A research team I lead recently put together a spreadsheet of all the Protestant institutions in America that require students to take at least one course that addresses the Christian tradition (and not simply religion generally). There are 249 such Protestant…

As most any study of general education will tell you, students do not find general education engaging. As this study from the Harvard General Education Review Committee found, “Students report not taking their Gen Ed courses as seriously as other courses.” Yet, “Students wish more Gen Ed courses were worth taking seriously.” I think the problem is…

As Friday’s post mentioned, virtue education is not effectively accomplished in a liberal arts classroom education. It requires what the foremost expert on excellence, Anders Ericsson, called deliberate practice. One of the keys Ericsson found to deliberate practice in a particular endeavor is to improve one’s mental representations. He defines a mental representations as “a…

Between 1928 and 1930, Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May published a series of famous studies about character that would set back the study of virtue for over a half-century. Based on their studies Hartshorne and May concluded there was no such thing as stable character traits in people.Hugh Hartshorne, Mark May, and Julius B. Maller,…

"I want it all, I want it now"QueenYour kingdom come.Your will be done,on earth as it is in heaven.Jesus In their song, “I Want It All,” the rock band Queen famously described the outrageous desire to want it all and want it now as characteristic of the cries and dreams of youth. Empirically speaking, Queen…

Some years ago, I read back-to-back autobiographies of two retired tennis players who had achieved excellence during their lives: Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. There is little doubt that both underwent exacting forms of practice with coaches that built incredible physical and mental habits. Yet, as Andre Agassi said in his autobiography, “We could not…