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Faith and Learning as a Life of Pilgrimage: A Response to Joseph Clair

We appreciate Professor Clair’s impassioned review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage. At the beginning of his piece, he nicely summarizes the book, noting its historical awareness; its sensitivity to Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal perspectives; and its analysis of America’s evolving intellectual ecosystem. Clair identifies the notion of pilgrimage as a central…
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Toward the City: Rethinking the Pilgrimage Metaphor for Faith and Learning–A Review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage

In their latest installment chronicling the relationship between religion and American higher education, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen turn to the constructive task of offering a novel and hopeful model of faith and learning suited to the present moment. Rather than remain entrenched in the enclosed ghettos of polarizing and identity-­constrained thinking, “pilgrim thinking”…
February 23, 2026
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The Poisonwood Bible: Revisiting a Barbara Kingsolver Bestseller

When it was first published in 1998, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, not only became a bestseller but was even selected by Oprah’s Book Club. And it still holds a special place in many people’s lives all these years later. When people are asked which books have meant the most to them, they often…
February 19, 2026
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The Purpose of Teaching

I sometimes wonder what I want to achieve with my students. When I started teaching in 2000, at the mature age of 23, I primarily taught for the pleasure of teaching. I also did it to help students acquire the knowledge required by the course and subsequent courses. At that time, I taught C++ programming,…
February 18, 2026
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Wombs, Tombs, and the “Wonderful Things” of God

My wife and I recently returned from a visit to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. George Vanderbilt, grandson of the famed shipping and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, envisioned and constructed his family’s palatial Southern Appalachian home in the late nineteenthcentury. Inspired by the Châteauesque architectural style of France and England, the 250-room Biltmore…
February 16, 2026

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Christian Reflections on Vibe Coding

If you follow trends in software engineering, you may have encountered the term “vibe coding,” recently popularized by Andrej Karpathy, deep learning researcher and OpenAI co-founder.Kevin, R. (2025, February 27). Not a Coder? With A.I., Just Having an Idea Can Be Enough. New York Times. This is how he defines the approach: There’s a new kind…
April 11, 2025
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Trump’s Tariffs Fail the Tests of Stewardship and Justice

Economists generally don’t like tariffs. This was true even before the latest round of tariffs implemented by President Donald Trump. Various surveys have found that around 90 percent of economists believe that tariffs will negatively impact economic welfare, and a similar amount believe that tariffs lead to inflation.As just one example, see https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/framing-next-four-years-tariffs-tax-cuts-and-other-uncertainties-trump. This is…
April 10, 2025
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Can Christian Higher Education Save Itself?

It is time to look around the corner As in all other spheres of higher education, religious colleges and universities today are experiencing a transformation. These schools must chart a path forward in a complex environment marred by a growing mistrust of the academy, increased skepticism about the value of a college degree, and a…
April 9, 2025
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The Unredeemed Liberal Arts: And How to Save Them (Part 1)

If you ask almost any student or professor what the purpose of the liberal arts is, they will likely not give you an explicitly theologically informed answer. Instead, they will likely discuss how  “it fosters critical thinking,” or helps one “adopt different approaches to understanding,” or “trains one’s mind to be agile.”For samples of this…
April 7, 2025
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Living Humanely Amid Our Inhumanity

I just finished watching the series A Small Light (currently available on Amazon Prime) with my wife and 17-year-old daughter. The three of us are going to the Netherlands in a few days, me for a conference and a bit of sightseeing, and the two of them exclusively for sightseeing during my daughter’s spring break.…
April 4, 2025
BlogReviews

A Review of Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity.

In the past decade—or perhaps more precisely since the advent of Donald Trump into Republican politics—evangelical Protestants have debated so-­called “Christian nationalism,” a term that is so nebulous and so ill-­defined that it can loop in secularist Trumpist politics, Christian Reconstruction, and nearly anything else that is exotic enough to pique the interest—or derision, or…
April 3, 2025
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Translanguaging as a Humanizing Pedagogy

Author’s note: As I read about President Trump’s recent executive order declaring English as the official language of the United States and reflected on its potential implications, I was reminded of a podcast episode in which I interviewed Dr. Grace Inae Blum.  Dr. Blum teaches and writes about humanizing teacher education, teacher preparation for culturally…
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Artificial Intelligence, the Comfort of Knowing, and the Unease of Prayer

Conversations surrounding the practical use of artificial intelligence in student academic work seem to be less straight-forward than those having to do with plagiarism.This is not to say considerations about plagiarism should be one-dimensional. For thoughtful considerations dealing with these topics, I highly recommend Rachel B. Griffis, “Plagiarism as the Language of Ownership: Aligning Academic…
March 31, 2025
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How Are Men Fallen? Evaluating a New Toxic Masculinity Scale

Just as both men and women are created in God’s image, we are also both fallen. Moreover, there can be sex differences among men and women (often simply in terms of percentages and not absolutes) in the ways they demonstrate virtue and vice. What that means and what the redemption of masculinity and femininity might…
March 28, 2025