Completing a dissertation involves getting into the weeds. As a bipolar disorder and quality-of-life researcher, I’ve found the swamp is quite vast. In recent years, quality of life has become an important outcome in chronic illness research (Flanagan et al. 2017). This is true in qualitative research, which explores how people experience illness, and in…

The title of this reflection on God’s handiwork comes from an assertion made by the beloved London preacher of the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It is from his commentary on Psalm 111—the Psalm of God’s Works, published in his seven-volume magnum opus, The Treasury of David. In the commentary, he continues the title’s assertion,…

It is a fundamental human urge to answer the questions: Who am I? Why do I matter? What is my life for? And because we are humans bearing the image of God, we have an indelible instinct that these questions of identity, value, and purpose have positive answers and that these answers have something to…

The adage still holds true: “You are what you eat.” French author and gastronome Jean Brillat-Savarin astutely commented, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”  Although his comment was focused on the things we physically consume to fuel our bodies, it also rings true of the things in our…

A variety of large language models, commonly called “artificial intelligence” (AI), have seen increasing popularity and widespread adoption in recent years. In fact, the popularity of chatbots like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT has caused many to think that AI is synonymous with chatbots. However, AI comprises far more than chatbots, encompassing a variety of machine…

“For with whatever standard you judge, you will be judged, and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you.” - Matt 7:2  Matthew 7:2 has always fascinated me. It seems to sit at the juncture of some sticky Christian problems: Can you call out sin without judging? If we forego all judgment,…