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Reinforcement Learning: A Christian Perspective

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…
October 6, 2026
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Shrapnel Blast: Judging and Measuring 

“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,…
October 5, 2026
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Hockey and the Academic Calling

One of the first things I learned when I started graduate school was how to be a hockey coach. Actually, this happened several weeks before I registered for any courses at the University of Alberta. We arrived in Edmonton—four hundred miles north of the Montana border—well before the first academic term began. We had no…
September 29, 2026
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The Death of Religion? A Common American Fear

From our nation’s beginnings, Americans have feared the death of religion. The Puritans had not even arrived in the New World before they started predicting what would happen should they prove faithless to the Lord. In his “Model of Christian Charity” address, given to English Puritans departing for New England in 1630, Massachusetts Bay Company…

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Guest Post – Pride and Humility in Christian Educators

Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. (1 Peter 3:8) Pride, like love, is a funny thing. Maybe it’s academics in general or Twitter exclusively or the dangerous combination of the two, but it seems like pride is a distinguishing mark of the new…
October 18, 2021
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COVID-19 and Romans 15, Part 2: Pauline Solutions

Coming back together for education this Fall is a long process that is more a marathon than a sprint—and we’ve already run uphill for a year and a half. This leads to the problems we’re now facing, described in Part 1. How do we continue to navigate these conflicts, divisions, and needs, without enough staff…
October 14, 2021
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COVID-19 and Romans 15, Part 1: Problematic Reunions

A year and a half ago, in the middle of lockdown, it seemed like reunion would never come. Now, it is coming and has already come, in an “already/not yet” sort of dichotomy. Our campus communities are experiencing the joys, and problems, of reunion, as people like me keep an eye on my university’s COVID-19…
October 13, 2021
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Tactile Interface

Author’s Note: This is a slightly revised version of the Presidential Address delivered to the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Southern Section, in November 2004. At that time, the iPhone was but a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye. As we theorize about the many ills facing our nation’s youth (and their possible…
October 12, 2021
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Golden Age

In 1863, five years before his death at age 86, the French painter J-A-D Ingres completed a small, jewel-like canvas he titled The Golden Age. It is a gentle, luxuriant fantasy, this little picture. Blue mountains rise in the distance, and the air seems hung with gilded mist. The afternoon light burnishes green trees to…
October 11, 2021
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The Meaning of Technology

The book of Genesis opens with the creation account describing a beautiful world of sea, earth, sky, plants, fish, birds and other animals. And then God places a human in the garden. Immediately following this part of the story is a curious verse, which at first seems out of place. The verse is Genesis 2:12,…
October 8, 2021
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Responding to Student Excuses with the Wisdom of Solomon

These years are rough, no doubt, with both students and faculty altering daily life in order to survive the pandemic—and grieving those who didn’t. While many challenges are novel, and hopefully temporary, one is perennial: the student excuse. Faculty may see student excuses as annoying time-drains that divert from the real work of education and…
October 7, 2021
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Shouting at Your Neighbor: Why We Bother with Other People’s Languages

This essay was published in 2012 in the book Practically Human: College Professors Speak from the Heart of Humanities Education edited by Gary Schmidt & Matthew Walhout (Grand Rapids: Calvin College Press, 2012, 133-145). It asks why we invest time and resources in learning other languages and seeks to look further than pragmatic motivations based…
October 6, 2021