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Gather Up the Leftovers. Let Nothing Go to Waste.

Americans waste food on a grand scale. Though figures are appalling–30-40% of our food supply gets wasted, by USDA estimates, about 60 million tons a year, worth over $200 billion – big numbers fail to change behavior. First-year students in a seminar I teach on the history of American diet trends are reliably conscientious about…
June 30, 2025
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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
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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
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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

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The Tragedy of Teaching: Greatness Without Goodness

It is the time of year when those of us who serve as teachers, from college to Kindergarten, are ramping up our preparation for the upcoming term. In my home university, new faculty are arriving on campus this week for onboarding, next week will be devoted to faculty meetings at the university and college level,…
August 19, 2024
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Christian Legal Thought – Why Bother?

One of the first questions I ask students in my Christian Legal Thought seminar is what they expect Christianity might have to say about law. A common answer is that Christian teaching can provide guidance about what the legal rules should be.  Many of my students have been taught the importance of having a Christian…
August 16, 2024
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Reading Tragedy and Professing Hope

A few years back, one of my literature classes read Misha Nogha’s “Chippoke Na Gomi,”Misha Nogha, “Chippoke Na Gomi,” The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 630-636. an intriguing and provocative science fiction story exploring the repercussions of atomic weaponry and the responsibilities we have to one another.This article first…
August 15, 2024
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The Scandal of Required English Classes at Christian Universities

Every Christian university requires at least one English composition, writing, and/or literature class. Thus, one would think that someone reviewing those course descriptions would find considerable evidence demonstrating how Christianity relates to these basic courses. You would be wrong. We recently analyzed the required gen ed course descriptions at all Protestant and Catholic universities that…
August 14, 2024
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Faustus and Fortnite

The overwhelming ambition and pride of Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor FaustusChristopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (B-Text, 1616), ed. David Scott Kastan, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005), 54-122. is frequently highlighted as one of the work's central themes, and rightfully so. However, our students might connect equally, if not more, with…
August 9, 2024
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Vocation and Avocation on the Christian Campus

The last year was big for me as an academic: I received tenure, published a book, and was awarded a sabbatical. Yet my colleagues and students tend not to ask me about these landmarks. They instead know me as a gardener, thanks to the pictures I post to social media. Truth be told, I find…
August 8, 2024
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Humble Worldviewing

One of my courses in seminary—a half-century ago!—had a lasting impact on my thinking. It was about world religions, and especially helpful for me was an assigned text, Christian Faith and Other Faiths, by Stephen Neill,Stephen Neill, Christian Faith and Other Faiths: The Christian Dialogue with Other Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). then a…
August 7, 2024
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Where the Beauty Came From

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.” —C. S. Lewis At age eleven classical music started it all for me. My parents, wanting to divert me from what they viewed as the corrupting rock ‘n’ roll of the…
August 6, 2024