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Put on the Attire of Leadership (Part 2)

Many years ago, my wife, Phyllis, and I were the guests of the University of Notre Dame provost at a football game in South Bend, Indiana, between the Fighting Irish and West Point. At halftime, someone pointed me toward the private box where the leaders of the two schools were watching the game together. I…
November 19, 2025
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Leadership: It’s Not Only for Administrators (Part 1)

About 10 years after I became the president of Fuller Seminary, I received a letter from a college student asking me for career advice. His goal in life, he said, was to be the kind of academic president that I was, and he wondered how he should prepare for that role. I wrote back, telling…
November 18, 2025
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Music: The Soul of the Liberal Arts

Many colleges and universities, within the CCCU and without, continue to be faced with difficult questions regarding which academic programs to retain and which to “consolidate.” There are an incredible number of factors that inform each of these considerations, and I do not covet those who are tasked with the corresponding decisions. It is often…
November 17, 2025
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A Distinctly Christian Approach to Engineering

Should there be a distinctively Christian approach to engineering? If so, is it possible? After all, Christians and non-Christians seem to agree on all the technical details in engineering, like integration, derivation, Fourier transforms, and finite element analysis. So why do we take a distinctly Christian approach to engineering? The first and foremost reason that…
November 14, 2025
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An Open Letter to Non-Believers in Academia

Dear Non-Believing Colleagues: My open letter is divided into two parts. The first one opens with a parable of sorts. An atheist professor once approached a colleague with a sensitive question. The latter was a religiously devout academic from a distant foreign country who appeared to hold traditional views. “In your view,” she asked, “is…
November 13, 2025
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Christians Reading Classics: An Excerpt

The following excerpt from Nadya Williams, Christians Reading Classics, is published with permission from Zondervan Academic. *** Sometime in the mid-fourth century BC, a young man, Ariston, was walking home one evening from the shrine of Persephone in Athens. Suddenly, a middle-aged man named Konon along with his son and a couple of other associates…
November 12, 2025

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Sharing Our Screens

Recently I re-watched The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man, played by Jim Carey, who discovers that his life has been broadcast to the world as a reality TV show. Though produced a quarter of a century ago, the movie’s critique of an “always-on,” surveillant media culture felt timely and spoke to my…
December 9, 2024
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Not Quite Exiles nor Never Much of an Eden: The Meaning of Vocation for the Professorate Thirty Years after the Publication of Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden

The early 1990s saw a rash of books on religion and higher education, and Mark Schwehn’s 1993 Exiles From Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America was a book unlike any of the rest. It begins with two memorable illustrations of the central problem Schwehn addresses. The first recalls a faculty get-­together at the…
December 5, 2024
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Be the Hope You Seek

A friend asked me not so long ago, “Where can we find hope in such uncertain times?” Many of us have been asking this reasonable and pressing question for much of the past five years. As Christians, we can easily recite a couple of the 140 Bible verses that, in various different stories and admonitions,…
December 4, 2024
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Christ-Animated Scholarship and Human Worth

Every once in a while, I come across an article or book that exemplifies the best of what Christ-animated scholarship can and should be. I recently came across one such article in the field of psychology that addressed the topic of human worth. The concepts of self-worth and self-esteem have a long history in the…
December 3, 2024
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“Apostle to the Disillusioned” — A Response to Tomáš Halík

I appreciate Father Halík’s response to my review of his book. Let me reiterate that it’s an impressive work replete with valuable insights and many nuggets of wisdom and sanity. Despite the criticisms that I offered, his and my analysis of contemporary Christianity/Catholicism overlap considerably. In wondering whether forces extrinsic to the church have caused…
November 22, 2024
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“Apostle to the Disillusioned” — A Review of Tomáš Halík’s The Afternoon of Christianity

When an influential priest (the Czech, Templeton-­award winning author, teacher, and theologian Tomáš Halík) criticizes “ecclesiastical authorities” while seeking to advance the agenda of another ecclesiastical authority (in-deed, the highest of them all: Pope Francis, to whom the book is dedicated), one can’t help but be hopeful for or at least curious about the future…
November 20, 2024
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Doctors Crossing Borders, and Other Perils of Professional Training

This fall I am teaching an Honors Seminar designed for students in my home university’s College of Health Sciences. The students are all eager to pursue their professional careers as medical doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. Sadly, only 10% of them have expressed any interest in practicing in those parts of the world where they…
November 19, 2024
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When Judgment Hurts

Last month, I attended a conference at Calvin University focused on how to counter reductionism in teaching and education. Certainly, our culture has been in thrall to reductionist tendencies for some time, as the angry, dismissive tone of internet culture and political discourse shows us. Sadly, this tone often makes its way into the classroom,…
November 18, 2024