Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on Thomas Kidd's substack. The ‘critical book review’ is a staple of course assignments in colleges and seminaries. But I find that some students simply do not know what it means to write a ‘critical’ book review. Some students seem to think that ‘critical’ just means summarizing the book…

While Colorado is known for having 50 mountains that exceed 14,000 feet, my home state of Washington boasts its own mountainous claims, with nearly 100 reaching mile-high peaks. Yet one among them stands out. At 14,409 feet and 60 miles southeast of Seattle, Mt. Rainier is simply known as “the mountain.” In a city that…

Some months ago, I rode to the airport with Uber, as I have done many times before and since. I noticed before the car arrived that the driver had high ratings for “excellent conversation.” Sure enough, it was not long before he started raising topics for discussion. He was driving for Uber on his day…

Our two boys were three and six years old when my wife contracted Guillain Barré. Fortunately, the doctors were able to stop its deadly progression caused by her immune system going crazy and demyelinating her nerves before it reached her vital organs. She spent the next year in bed on a roller coaster of "recovery"…

“…you are shockingly fit.” These are the words from a young man who happened to be in the weight room at the same time I was in the fall semester of 2021. Of course, this was a semester in which COVID containment measures were plentiful. Student times were separated from faculty and staff times in…

“He was only nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina As a mom and a Christian college…

In my family, like many Korean American families, we regularly communicate using Konglish (Korean + English). We rely on Konglish when something complicated or multilayered can be better expressed using a combination of Korean and English words. The other day, during an evening walk with my spouse, I said the following about two students who…

Now that Donald Trump has become president, one of his signature initiatives is a proposal to form a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). According to Trump, DOGE will “pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/11/trump-vows-dismantle-federal-bureaucracy-and-restructure-agencies-new-musk-led-commission/400998/. This new entity will be led by…

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…