Perry L. Glanzer

I am continually amazed at how provincial and specialized contemporary graduate education is. By provincial and specialized, I mean that there is usually little interdisciplinary conversation that takes place within the curricula. Unfortunately, Christianity graduate education, which has reasons to overcome disciplinary silos, fails to counter this culture. In fact, although Christian institutions are supposed…

In 1994 and 1995, I traveled to seventeen different cities in Russia and Ukraine to study a ground-breaking undertaking. Known as The CoMission, it was a vast partnership of Western mission groups, parachurch groups, and denominations that sought to educate former Soviet public educators who taught communist ethics on how to teach Christian ethics. It…

When visiting Australia this past year, I happened to catch a taxi ride with an Australian citizen from India who began asking about my religious background. That encounter led to a fascinating conversation about his own Christian experience. He converted to Christianity in India as a teenager and then sought to witness to a group…

“A man may have to die for his country, but no man must, in an exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.”…

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…