This essay is adapted from The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports (Oxford University Press). In its American form, muscular Christianity sought to counter the supposed feminization of the Protestant church by presenting a more masculine image fit for a “strenuous” age of American expansion. Athletics became an important part of the…

"Tryna make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die”Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Verve I remember seeing an empirical finding as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s and often thereafter. The finding came from the First Year Survey given annually by the Higher Education Research Institution at UCLA. They gave first-year students…

It is a season of change in the American higher education world. The technological tsunami of online education has broken across the university beachfront and the economic efficiency for students being able to earn a degree without leaving home, and often at reduced tuition, has produced a massive increase in online programs. At the same…

Montana is part of “Big Sky Country.” During a sabbatical last semester (thank you, Calvin University!), my wife and I spent time under the big sky and worked on writing projects. Unobstructed views and dramatic land features yield a sense of perspective that the sky’s not just big, it’s enormous. In parts of Montana, plains…

This past summer a terrible forest fire raced through Jasper National Park in Alberta, scorching wide swaths of the park and destroying a third of the town of Jasper; but even before the long winter set in, signs of new life were beginning to sprout. In a generation or two, the forests will have returned…

In this post-election period, there is a desire among many people to come together across political differences to restore civility and cooperation within workplaces, families, or even marriages. One of the major barriers to doing this is the belief that “I am right; they are biased,” which is referred to as the bias blind spot.…

Editor’s Note: In honor of Martin Luther King Day, we encourage you to read the following passage from Frederick Douglas’  “The Nature of Slavery” (1855) in which he describes how slavery mars the image of God  in humanity and undermines efforts to educate humans to their full capacity.   The very accompaniments of the slave…

A 2018 volume on Mainline Protestantism opened by asking the question, “Is American mainline Protestantism a relic of a bygone era, the religious equivalent of Howard Johnsons’ Restaurants or Sears, a former giant now fighting for cultural relevance?” On one hand, one could argue that things are not quite that bad at the moment in…

Remember all of that negative press about Christian Higher Education (CHE) declining? (see my posts on this topic here, here, and here). The just-released IPEDs Fall 2023 enrollment numbers should hopefully put a rest to that story for at least a year. The good news is that even though higher education as a whole faces…

Editor’s Note: After reading a couple of our posts about the stewardship of the body problem in Christian higher education (see here and here), Brad Bloom who publishes the Faith and Fitness Magazine, thought our audience might be interested in reading about how they are thinking about the subject for the popular fitness audience. Yesterday and today's posts are reproduced…