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The Nature of Slavery

Editor’s Note: In honor of Martin Luther King Day, we encourage you to read the following passage from Frederick Douglas’  “The Nature of Slavery” (1855) in which he describes how slavery mars the image of God  in humanity and undermines efforts to educate humans to their full capacity.   The very accompaniments of the slave…
January 20, 2025
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The Dismal State of Mainline Protestant Higher Education

A 2018 volume on Mainline Protestantism opened by asking the question, “Is American mainline Protestantism a relic of a bygone era, the religious equivalent of Howard Johnsons’ Restaurants or Sears, a former giant now fighting for cultural relevance?” On one hand, one could argue that things are not quite that bad at the moment in…
January 17, 2025
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How To Do Faith And Fitness With Proper Form

Editor’s Note: After reading a couple of our posts about the stewardship of the body problem in Christian higher education (see here and here), Brad Bloom who publishes the Faith and Fitness Magazine, thought our audience might be interested in reading about how they are thinking about the subject for the popular fitness audience. Yesterday and today's posts are reproduced…
January 15, 2025
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Moving Beyond Faith-Based Fitness

Editor's Note: After reading a couple of our posts about the stewardship of the body problem in Christian higher education (see here and here), Brad Bloom, who publishes the Faith & Fitness Magazine, thought our audience might be interested in reading about how they are encouraging the popular fitness audience to think Christianly about the subject.…
January 14, 2025
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This January: Fifty Percent Off at the Christmas Shop

I have a complicated relationship with seasonal Christmas shops. I’ll bet a lot of us do. It began in the 1990s. Like most adolescents, I developed a contrarian streak when it came to the elders’ sacred cows. December rituals around Christmas Tree Shops (or their copycats) were no exception. I had a lot of reasons…
January 13, 2025

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Faith & Business: Beyond Add-On Models

With the ability to captivate our hearts, awaken imaginations and paint pictures of what it means to be a good person, stories help form (and malform) character and influence behavior.For a recent and thoughtful account of how character is formed consciously and unconsciously, see James KA Smith’s Cultural Liturgies books series: Imaging the Kingdom, Desiring…
July 3, 2024
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What Does Christianity Have to Do with Economics? Three Approaches

Since most faculty are trained in thoroughly secular universities and disciplines, it can take some work to figure out what difference Christian faith can have in the practice of your discipline. I have noticed that there is a particular difficulty of this kind for economists. In this blog post, I describe the background for that…
Steven McMullen Headshot
July 2, 2024
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Personifying Prudence: The Face(s) of Wisdom

Wisdom often feels like a vague, shadowy concept—something we all want but do not really understand. Sometimes we equate wisdom with intelligence, but it certainly is not guaranteed by a high IQ. Sometimes we talk about wisdom as if it were a synonym for inner peace or an automatic characteristic gained from old age or…
June 25, 2024
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Making Virtue Personal, Part 1

My students rarely know what kindness really means. When they provide feedback on their classmates’ papers, for instance, they think kindness means happy faces and exclamation marks, and a “Great Job!” written at the end. And they often think people like me, who offer them substantial critiques to help make their writing better, are simply…
June 24, 2024
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Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age.

One exercise on political partisanship I enjoy doing with my classes is to read out a list of words and phrases while the students work together to classify them as either red or blue—Republican or Democrat. It starts off simply with broad groups in the population: the students all “know” that farmers are red while…
June 20, 2024
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In Defense of Those Who Work and Build, Part 2

In yesterday’s post, I showed how the Victorian Thomas Carlyle, though a strong critic of the Industrial Revolution, defended work as a good and godly thing. In this post, I shall extend my analysis to two other Victorians who also balanced a critique of the excesses of industrialism with a celebration of our God-given call…
June 19, 2024
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In Defense of Those Who Work and Build, Part 1

Our academic age celebrates the critic more than the creator. One finds this represented in our most discussed theory of the past few decades—critical theory. Contemporary academics tend to look with suspicion upon entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. This academic tendency is not unusual for this age though. Academic critics during the Industrial Revolution exhibited…
June 18, 2024