As the subtitle suggests, Shirley Mullen’s new book, Claiming the Courageous Middle, invites believers to dare “to live and work together for a more hopeful future.” This applies to all areas of life, from family to church membership, and to jobs as well, even that of professor. I don’t refer to professors as daring; I’d…

We face yet another presidential election season, and in the fall, college campuses across the country will host seminars, roundtables, and talks to help students prepare for what’s to come. One question that certainly will arise has to do with Christianity’s relationship to political power, a question that’s hard to escape when former President (and…

American confidence in the “value” of higher education is plummeting. In 2015, 57% of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, but in 2023 that number fell to a mere 36%.Megan Brenan, “Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply,” Gallup. 2023 July 11, https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx?version=print. What role might academics…

As a member of Generation X, I have visual memories of the discrete, physical sources through which I was expected to access information as a child and young adult. There were physical books—novels, informational texts, and monographs; encyclopedias, dictionaries, and almanacs; as well as newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. In school I was taught how…

How do two utterly dissimilar things come together? How can they be reconciled? By rising. As the phrase goes, attributed to the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and popularized by the novelist Flanner O’Connor, “everything that rises must converge.” And it converges upon a lofty, shared Object, the source and end of our desire,…

Near the end of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the youngest brother, Alyosha, makes a curious claim, one that has reframed the way I think about education. Alyosha has gathered around him the schoolboys he befriended on the very day of their friend Ilyusha’s funeral. Addressing the boys alternately as “gentlemen” and “my…

This virtue is not on any of the lists of character qualities for character education in public schools. One will also not find it on lists of virtues compiled by positive psychology scholars. Yet, it is perhaps one of the most important missing virtues among North American college students today. For example, Christian Smith found…

It seems that we have never had so much free time and so little idea how to use it. As is often the case, contemporary music articulates our pathologies: The progressive rock band, Styx, in their song, “Too Much Time On My Hands” confess, “I’ve got nothing to do / and all day long to…

In the previous post we offered some foundational considerations for a Christ-animated FYE classroom, including ways to weave in a biblical worldview and help students push back against the common lies influencing their identity. These two strategies, though more ideological in nature, help FYE instructors ensure their classrooms are not merely adding Jesus to the…

The first-year experience (FYE) is a decades-old programmatic initiative aimed at introducing students to campus culture, improving transitions, and promoting retention, often through a course or classroom seminar. Research shows that FYE courses are valuable for students in general, as well as in specific subpopulations (e.g., international, first-gen, etc.) typically in need of additional support…