Skip to main content
Blog

The Creed and a Christian Worldview

Anniversaries matter. If you’re a cancer survivor, each year of remission offers a fresh lease on life. If you’re married, every annual commemoration of your wedding is an opportunity to recommit to your vows. Your work anniversary may include a bonus or raise. The anniversary of a loved one’s death summons both grief and remembrance.…
June 27, 2025
Blog

How Coaching Youth Sports Helped My Thinking about Christian Character

The most important activity that helped refine my view of character education was not taking classes on epistemology and ethics from Dallas Willard. Nor was it taking all my other Ph.D. classes that addressed virtue or moral development. It was coaching youth league sports. Granted, readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology led me to recognize…
June 25, 2025
Blog

AI and the Grammar of Descent

Recently, there’s been even more press than usual about AI proliferation and its associated risks. The hype has been driven, in part, by the now infamous Ross Douthat interview with Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, in which Kokotajlo suggests that AI could take over civilization—and “then kill all the humans”—by 2027.…
June 24, 2025

Subscribe

for new content notifications, access to video and audio conversations with our writers, and invitations to our events.

Blog

The Problem of Aesthetics: Can We Trust Ourselves to Recognize Beauty?

Last year, I hosted a chocolate-tasting lab for a large group of honors students. I provided them with several types of chocolate, and together we went through a slow process of reaction, evaluation, and comparison. Their specimens for consideration included: Hershey’s milk chocolate, a very fine 72% dark chocolate, an increasingly bitter 80% dark chocolate,…
October 24, 2024
Blog

The Anxious Generation: A Christian Educator’s Reflection

Social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has once again secured a spot on The New York Times Best Seller List with his latest book, The Anxious Generation. In this work, Haidt offers evidence-based insights into the psychological and sociological rationales leading to increased anxiety in Generation Z compared to Millennials.  Specifically, he investigates the cultural, social, and…
Blog

The First Artists, Part 2: Contingency and Inevitability

In the first part of this essay, I described how the twenty-first-century discovery of the oldest paintings on earth in Indonesia – including the Sulawesi warty pig – illustrates the main points of Darrel R. Falk’s On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species.Darrel R. Falk. On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species. (Wipf and Stock Publishers,…
October 22, 2024
Blog

The First Artists, Part 1: Consciousness and Imagination

Cave paintings and rusty ochre brushstrokes appear on the cover of Darrel R. Falk’s recently  published book, On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species.Darrel R. Falk. On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species. (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2023). These earliest examples of art call out to us today. Falk describes the European cave paintings in the…
October 21, 2024
Blog

Intelligent Design’s Evolution

This past year, I have seen headlines flash across the start page of my Microsoft browser’s newsfeed that featured articles about the supposed chemical origin of life. Was it the result of aliens seeding our planet billions of years ago – a theory called Panspermia? Or an asteroid bombardment with trace amino acids and nucleic…
October 18, 2024
Blog

Teaching for the Real World

“Our textbooks today are much more focused on practical things.” The student’s comment, offered in a class on world language pedagogy as we discussed historical examples of language textbooks, stood out as requiring more response than I quite knew how to pack into the moment. It was true and it was false, depending on the…
October 16, 2024
Blog

Blessings from Heaven Above to Earth Below: Celebrating the Internal Karstic Conduits of Mount Hermon

Bright Hermon, with the dayspring on thy brow, and silver streamlets leaping round thy feet,— Shout forth thy ceaseless praise!                                                   —Horatius Bonar, 1881, Hymns of Faith and Hope You would hardly think that observing the hippopotamus in Africa near the southern extent of the Great Rift Valley would somehow be connected to Mount…
October 11, 2024