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…

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,…

Many faculty professional development days, hallway dialogues between colleagues, and programs for the integration of faith and learning exist because of the common question: how can we motivate our students to desire learning? Although scaffolded course objectives and early alert systems for struggling students are designed with the ostensible end of effective teaching in mind,…

The words of Calvinists like Kuyper on the one hand, and secular “formalists” like Greenberg on the other, can sometimes seem interchangeable. However, Kuyper and Greenberg would certainly have disagreed concerning the “area of competence” contained in the “Artistic Sphere.” For Kuyper (and for Rookmaaker, who worked out Kuyper’s ideas through art criticism) the artist…

I was a senior in college when I first encountered Modern Art and the Death of a Culture by the Calvinist scholar Hans Rookmaaker.Hans Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (Crossway, 1994). I was studying art history at the Courtauld Institute in London; the book was lent to me by a local…

Since Charles Taylor published his monumental work A Secular Age (seriously, try picking up a copy, it’s huge) in 2007, Christian thinkers of a certain cast have been talking about “disenchantment.” This discourse persists through the present day, when, just as one example, O. Alan Noble has engaged with books on the subject of enchantment…

Derek Schuurman rightly warns against the use of chatbot “personas,” which are created by configuring a program like ChatGPT to respond in the style of a particular person. For Schuurman, the problem is that using these services encourages “ontological confusion” – by interacting with a computer as if it is a human being, “we run…

I have heard wise colleagues rightly say that the Christian university is not the church. This is a prudent reminder. Nonetheless, I would like to explore how a comparison between the first-century Jerusalem Temple and modern Christian universities might provide a useful guide for faculty, staff, administrators, and trustees at Christian colleges. Such a comparison…

This blog introduces our fall special-themed issue exploring the Christian academic vocation through the lens of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on the scholarly vocation. The articles are currently available on our website, while the paper copies of the issue will be delivered to our sponsor institutions later this month. On August 31, 1837, Emerson greeted…