“Should my teaching be any different at a Christian college…?”Arlin Migliazzo, “Introduction: An Odyssey of the Mind and Spirit,” Teaching as an Act of Faith: Theory and Practice in Church-Related Higher Education, Fordham University Press, 2003. xix. Most readers of The Christian Scholar’s Review Blog will undoubtedly affirm that yes, in our role as Christian…

As Dennis Hiebert’s post recounted yesterday, Christians have been arguing about empathy. Usually, I find myself, as a Christian moral educator, disagreeing with most parties in this conversation, whether they hail from the theological/political right or left. In this essay, I propose an alternative approach to thinking about empathy that differs from the books and…

Given the military setting of all four verses of their national anthem, Americans have unsurprisingly employed the same rhetoric to declare a “war on poverty” (Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964), a “war on drugs” (Richard Nixon, 1971), a “war on terror” (George W. Bush, 2001), and an ongoing “war on crime.” Nevertheless, commencement by some Americans…

An old word for “good work” is vocation, and another way to say this is to say that our fundamental responsibility, as colleges and universities, is to inspire our students to seek, and help them to discern, their vocations. The NetVUE project has done a lot to revive and expand the concept of vocation beyond…

Students usually come to our institutions with one of three aims in mind: to get a job, to change the world, or to “grow as a person,” as they like to put it. Unsurprisingly, these three aims correspond to the three aims that define contemporary higher ed: to train workers for the economy, to drive…

I was driving north from Edmonton to a Canadian farm family on the 54th parallel. Soon, I would be stopping for tea with them. As I approached Neerlandia, the name of their community, I was startled by a Timber Wolf crossing the road in front of me. A few minutes later, I was even more…