Being an athlete is often depicted as being interchangeable with striving for glory.  Indeed the pinnacle of achievement in sports is almost always depicted as receiving public acclaim and recognition.  The Olympics even mythologize this fact by representing spatially what is implied figuratively by placing the top athlete in each field atop a podium above…

We were in the middle of a staff retreat when the events related to the capital riots began to unfold.  I noticed eyes were darting to phones and news alerts on screens as we worked through strategy and policy for the upcoming Covid-19 impacted semester.  I, too, was distracted and finally stopped the planning to…

For ten months my laboratory has sat empty and dark. But it is never quiet. An aggressive air handling system has covered the vacant benches with humming and whirring through nearly a year of distance learning. My institution went fully online in March, like most other schools, but we continued to be primarily online throughout…

In the summer of 2020 Falls City Press released a collection of essays by David S. Guthrie: Dreaming Dreams for Christian Higher Education (for a 20% discount enter “CSR”). Guthrie is Teaching Professor of Education in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State University, where he has taught since 2014. He is also a…

I imagine that most of us are looking through the binocular lenses of scholarly specialization and Christian faith as we seek to understand the January 6 attack on the Capitol: a day of infamy that will be a defining moment in our students’ lives, much as 9-11, the Challenger explosion, and the assassination of Martin…

Einstein once wrote: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.…

“Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps.”Roger Forsgren, “The Architecture of Evil”, The New Atlantis, Summer 2012. With this sentence, Roger Forsgren opens his article titled “The Architecture of Evil”. Although it was Hitler and his henchmen who unleashed death and destruction during the Second World War, it required railways, factories, warehouses, and…

How do we know Jesus was a woman? Answer: because, even after he was dead he had to get up and serve people. Some context may be helpful. I was the only man in a graduate seminar on feminist rhetoric.  Along with six other Ph.D. students we were part of a list serve and often…

A common approach to the Christmas season is to study the “titles” of Christ, perhaps from Isaiah 9.  Between the season and some recent discussions about the use of “titles” I’ve been reflecting on the use of titles in our culture and my life.  Obviously, current American culture is both informal and egalitarian and becoming…

A Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Dr. Jill Biden to forego the use of her duly earned title has spurred recent conversations about the use of academic titles. Perry Glanzer’s recent post calling for “A Christian Reappraisal of Academic Titles” offers the refreshing promise to reframe these conversations through the lens of Christian values.…