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Wordy Professors, Woodland Elves, and the Wisdom of Tolkien

Modern (digital) life feels like drinking from a firehose. There’s so much content to triage. It was bad before the onslaught of generative AI. Now, the digital dam has burst. Our tendency to “give our two cents” about every issue—already increased by social media—has been further amplified by the AI-driven capacity for supercharged content creation.…
October 20, 2026
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Computers and the Good Life: Learning from Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry was a prolific writer, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. His recent passing encouraged me to reread some of his works and consider how they could be applied to my work in the field of computer science. If you know Berry’s work and life, you will already be aware of his refusal to…
October 19, 2026
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College Students Want Confidence: But Is It a Virtue that Can Be Taught?

Many of our students lack confidence and want more of it. For example, our research team gathered goals from almost 2,700 students nationwide from 14 institutions, for almost 6,500 goals. One clear longing they expressed was a desire for confidence, articulated in their goals such as the following:  “Improve my self-esteem/confidence.”  “Build my confidence.”  “Be…
October 16, 2026
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Frolicking in new Fields with AI

I had a question: could artificial intelligence (AI) help me visualise the textual form of my thoughts and help me re-work them in a picture. That way I could look at them again in a different light and also have a different medium through which to explain them to other people? I’m reasonably competent at…
October 15, 2026
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Freud and Suspicion

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. This year, then, is his 170th birthday year. That’s not a significant marker, but having come across that fact, I was reminded of all that I read about Freud during the 150th anniversary, in 2006, when we were given many anecdotes about his life. Here is one that stuck…
October 14, 2026

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The Ever Evolving and Evasive Nature of Knowledge

Editor's Note: Due to a technical issue with WordPress, this essay was published earlier this month without the text, only the tables. We have reposted the corrected version today.  Human culture and consciousness in the Global North have evolved profoundly over the past two millennia, and are conventionally referenced as the overlapping respective eras of…
November 21, 2025
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Thanksgiving, Hobbits, and the Way of Ennoblement

Jesus tells us that it is more blessed to give than to receive. With Thanksgiving approaching, I thought this an opportunity to reflect on giving, receiving, and what it means to be thankful. The popular conception of Thanksgiving is that it’s a time to give thanks for the blessings in our lives—for our family, friends,…
November 20, 2025
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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