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American Protestant Higher Education Continues to Grow!

Rumors of Christian higher education’s (CHE’s) demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, unlike the broader state and secular private sectors, American CHE continues to grow. The 2024 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System’s enrollment data is out, and the data provides good news for Protestant colleges. Catholic and Protestant Christian higher education enrollment, as I…
March 3, 2026
Blog

The Poet, an Instance of Human (Part II)

How do we train AI to recognize what is a human? In other words, what is an instance of the human? In my non-technical, lay-person’s understanding, AI makes this distinction by differentiating between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. In a semantic model, the output would be a silhouette of the whole group against the background.…
February 27, 2026
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Toward the City: A Final Response to the Jacobsens

I am grateful for the generous response of the authors to my review. I appreciate their clarification of the book’s overarching aim: to provide “a framework that increases the capacity of all scholars—whether biologists or poets, accountants or artists, nurses or philosophers—to recognize that faith intertwines with every aspect of their intellectual work,” and to…
February 25, 2026
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Faith and Learning as a Life of Pilgrimage: A Response to Joseph Clair

We appreciate Professor Clair’s impassioned review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage. At the beginning of his piece, he nicely summarizes the book, noting its historical awareness; its sensitivity to Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal perspectives; and its analysis of America’s evolving intellectual ecosystem. Clair identifies the notion of pilgrimage as a central…
Blog

Toward the City: Rethinking the Pilgrimage Metaphor for Faith and Learning–A Review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage

In their latest installment chronicling the relationship between religion and American higher education, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen turn to the constructive task of offering a novel and hopeful model of faith and learning suited to the present moment. Rather than remain entrenched in the enclosed ghettos of polarizing and identity-­constrained thinking, “pilgrim thinking”…
February 23, 2026

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The Wolves of Neerlandia

I was driving north from Edmonton to a Canadian farm family on the 54th parallel. Soon, I would be stopping for tea with them. As I approached Neerlandia, the name of their community, I was startled by a Timber Wolf crossing the road in front of me. A few minutes later, I was even more…
March 6, 2026
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Machiavelli and Christian Leadership

During my graduate studies in philosophy, and later, when I began my teaching career, one of my areas of focus was social-political thought. I concentrated in part on the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato and Aristotle. I dug into the detailed writings of the “social contract” thinkers of the modern period: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, especially.…
Richard Mouw
March 5, 2026
Blog

American Protestant Higher Education Continues to Grow!

Rumors of Christian higher education’s (CHE’s) demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, unlike the broader state and secular private sectors, American CHE continues to grow. The 2024 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System’s enrollment data is out, and the data provides good news for Protestant colleges. Catholic and Protestant Christian higher education enrollment, as I…
March 3, 2026
Blog

The Poet, an Instance of Human (Part II)

How do we train AI to recognize what is a human? In other words, what is an instance of the human? In my non-technical, lay-person’s understanding, AI makes this distinction by differentiating between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. In a semantic model, the output would be a silhouette of the whole group against the background.…
February 27, 2026
Blog

Toward the City: A Final Response to the Jacobsens

I am grateful for the generous response of the authors to my review. I appreciate their clarification of the book’s overarching aim: to provide “a framework that increases the capacity of all scholars—whether biologists or poets, accountants or artists, nurses or philosophers—to recognize that faith intertwines with every aspect of their intellectual work,” and to…
February 25, 2026
Blog

Faith and Learning as a Life of Pilgrimage: A Response to Joseph Clair

We appreciate Professor Clair’s impassioned review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage. At the beginning of his piece, he nicely summarizes the book, noting its historical awareness; its sensitivity to Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal perspectives; and its analysis of America’s evolving intellectual ecosystem. Clair identifies the notion of pilgrimage as a central…
Blog

Toward the City: Rethinking the Pilgrimage Metaphor for Faith and Learning–A Review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage

In their latest installment chronicling the relationship between religion and American higher education, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen turn to the constructive task of offering a novel and hopeful model of faith and learning suited to the present moment. Rather than remain entrenched in the enclosed ghettos of polarizing and identity-­constrained thinking, “pilgrim thinking”…
February 23, 2026