During my sabbatical in the winter quarter of 2025, I had the opportunity to begin a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program through the Spiritual Care Department at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington. In our first week of orientation, our CPE supervisor offered a definition of spiritual care that has stayed with me more than…

Common Themes and Tensions All three books reviewed in the previous two posts present common themes, such as the need for missional alignment of faculty and administration and the reality of challenges in the current higher education landscape. Langer and Rae directly state “that mission fidelity is everyone’s business,” especially in hiring, and outline ways…

The Fearless Christian University In this book, John Hawthorne is advocating for a fearless Christian university, which he defines as “an institution that understands its role in the higher education landscape, can articulate that position in meaningful ways, organize its people and programs in support of that mission, and become a laboratory for how people…

When I first became a provost at a small Christian college about ten years ago, I encountered the reality that forty percent of our faculty were within five years of retirement or already well beyond retirement age. Most of these faculty were long tenured members with a significant amount of institutional knowledge, strong academic leadership…

A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon cleaning out. I’m a fairly compulsive cleaner-outer, not overly sentimental, and very much in favor of order. This particular cleaning out was hard on me, though. I knew it would be going into it, but I was surprised by the direction my thoughts took and the strength…

Culture is one of those overused words that requires a clear definition to be helpful. Personally, I find one of the most useful definitions comes from H. Richard Niebuhr’s book, Christ and Culture. Every Christian should read Niebuhr’s famous work to help them develop Christian critical thinking about how Christ can and should animate one’s…

One of the odd things about those claiming that major portions of Christian and secular higher education are basically the same is that such a claim reveals an inability to understand complexity. They fail to recognize that key differences go all the way down to the way scholars use basic words. In fact, approaching scholarship…

Today, I want to discuss a second skill that I think should be a major component of advanced forms of Christ-Animated learning, yet I also rarely see it employed. For example, in the five years of editing this blog, I can only recall a few posts on this topic. Every Christian student at a Christian…

This new year, I would like to begin the Christ-Animated Learning Blog by presenting a four-part series about some advanced skills necessary for Christ-animating learning. Today, I begin by discussing one advanced skill that I think should be a major component of advanced forms of Christ-Animated learning, yet I rarely see it. For example, in…

The Christmas tree is tall and wide, and its sharp smell fills the room. It seems to own the space around it, and the rest of us hover in its shadow, coming and going like ghosts or puffs of wind. Somehow, the tree feels more real than the thing we call “reality.” My child self…