Becoming the Pastor’s Wife gets interesting immediately, with its subtitle: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry. When was ordination ever a common path for women? Hasn’t “pastor’s wife” always been the Christian ideal? Beth Allison Barr, professor of history at Baylor University, delves into the intrigue evoked by the book’s cover…

Part 2 – A Technological Partnership in the Academy The modern university has taken responsibility (we might call it a dominion mandate) for instructing generations in critical thought, writing, communication, and skill training, confirming the proficiencies of the students under our care. Our work has focused largely on certification, and AI practically eliminates that priority.…

Part 1 – A Theology of Work Few problems in recent memory have beset the Academy more swiftly than the infiltrating onslaught of bots infecting student learning. To be sure, cheating and plagiarism have always been problems threatening to undermine the educational enterprise. But in the last few years, as we are all aware, LLMs…

I am glad that Professor Tomlin appreciated my review of his outstanding book. We are both Pascalians, I wager, so our disagreements are not major. The sticking point is found in how we treat Pascal’s understanding of reason in apologetics, particularly regarding arguments for God’s existence. A few points will suffice: First, given Pascal’s several…

I am very grateful to Professor Douglas Groothuis for his generous and insightful review of my recent biography of Blaise Pascal. It is good to encounter a fellow scholar who has also found Pascal endlessly fascinating and instructive, and I am honoured to know that, with his long study and close knowledge of Pascal’s works,…

The French polymath, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), has rightly been called a masterful writer who shaped French prose, a brilliant mathematician, a pathbreaking experimental scientist, an inventor, a witty polemicist (The Provincial Letters), an apt and original Christian apologist (Pensées), and an acute philosopher, both in the disciplines of philosophy of science and philosophy of religion.Blaise…

The integration of faith in the classroom extends beyond lesson plans and syllabi. True integration begins not with course materials, but with the posture of your heart. As Christians, we are called to live according to the Fruit of the Spirit outlined in Galatians 5. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”…

During my sabbatical in the winter quarter of 2025, I had the opportunity to begin a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program through the Spiritual Care Department at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington. In our first week of orientation, our CPE supervisor offered a definition of spiritual care that has stayed with me more than…

Common Themes and Tensions All three books reviewed in the previous two posts present common themes, such as the need for missional alignment of faculty and administration and the reality of challenges in the current higher education landscape. Langer and Rae directly state “that mission fidelity is everyone’s business,” especially in hiring, and outline ways…

The Fearless Christian University In this book, John Hawthorne is advocating for a fearless Christian university, which he defines as “an institution that understands its role in the higher education landscape, can articulate that position in meaningful ways, organize its people and programs in support of that mission, and become a laboratory for how people…