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The Creed and a Christian Worldview

Anniversaries matter. If you’re a cancer survivor, each year of remission offers a fresh lease on life. If you’re married, every annual commemoration of your wedding is an opportunity to recommit to your vows. Your work anniversary may include a bonus or raise. The anniversary of a loved one’s death summons both grief and remembrance.…
June 27, 2025
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How Coaching Youth Sports Helped My Thinking about Christian Character

The most important activity that helped refine my view of character education was not taking classes on epistemology and ethics from Dallas Willard. Nor was it taking all my other Ph.D. classes that addressed virtue or moral development. It was coaching youth league sports. Granted, readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology led me to recognize…
June 25, 2025
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AI and the Grammar of Descent

Recently, there’s been even more press than usual about AI proliferation and its associated risks. The hype has been driven, in part, by the now infamous Ross Douthat interview with Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, in which Kokotajlo suggests that AI could take over civilization—and “then kill all the humans”—by 2027.…
June 24, 2025

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Ordering Our Loves and Understanding Our Limits

Our two boys were three and six years old when my wife contracted Guillain Barré. Fortunately, the doctors were able to stop its deadly progression caused by her immune system going crazy and demyelinating her nerves before it reached her vital organs. She spent the next year in bed on a roller coaster of "recovery"…
February 7, 2025
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Do as I Say…and as I Do

“…you are shockingly fit.” These are the words from a young man who happened to be in the weight room at the same time I was in the fall semester of 2021. Of course, this was a semester in which COVID containment measures were plentiful. Student times were separated from faculty and staff times in…
February 6, 2025
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Ontological Bruising. Ouch! What am I for?

“He was only nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina As a mom and a Christian college…
February 5, 2025
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On Konglish and Caring for Students

In my family, like many Korean American families, we regularly communicate using Konglish (Korean + English). We rely on Konglish when something complicated or multilayered can be better expressed using a combination of Korean and English words. The other day, during an evening walk with my spouse, I said the following about two students who…
February 4, 2025
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Does the United States Need a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? For Good Stewardship, Yes!

Now that Donald Trump has become president, one of his signature initiatives is a proposal to form a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). According to Trump, DOGE will “pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/11/trump-vows-dismantle-federal-bureaucracy-and-restructure-agencies-new-musk-led-commission/400998/. This new entity will be led by…
January 30, 2025
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Amos Alonzo Stagg and the Transformation of Muscular Christianity

This essay is adapted from The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports (Oxford University Press). In its American form, muscular Christianity sought to counter the supposed feminization of the Protestant church by presenting a more masculine image fit for a “strenuous” age of American expansion. Athletics became an important part of the…
January 29, 2025
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The Surprising Ways College Students Think about Money: And How Christian Institutions Do Little to Help Their Thinking

"Tryna make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die”Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Verve I remember seeing an empirical finding as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s and often thereafter. The finding came from the First Year Survey given annually by the Higher Education Research Institution at UCLA. They gave first-year students…
January 28, 2025
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An Ancient Tool for Change in a New University World

It is a season of change in the American higher education world. The technological tsunami of online education has broken across the university beachfront and the economic efficiency for students being able to earn a degree without leaving home, and often at reduced tuition, has produced a massive increase in online programs. At the same…
January 27, 2025
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Attention to our Limitation

Montana is part of “Big Sky Country.” During a sabbatical last semester (thank you, Calvin University!), my wife and I spent time under the big sky and worked on writing projects. Unobstructed views and dramatic land features yield a sense of perspective that the sky’s not just big, it’s enormous. In parts of Montana, plains…
January 23, 2025
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Robustness and Plasticity in Christian Higher Education

This past summer a terrible forest fire raced through Jasper National Park in Alberta, scorching wide swaths of the park and destroying a third of the town of Jasper; but even before the long winter set in, signs of new life were beginning to sprout. In a generation or two, the forests will have returned…
January 22, 2025