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Gather Up the Leftovers. Let Nothing Go to Waste.

Americans waste food on a grand scale. Though figures are appalling–30-40% of our food supply gets wasted, by USDA estimates, about 60 million tons a year, worth over $200 billion – big numbers fail to change behavior. First-year students in a seminar I teach on the history of American diet trends are reliably conscientious about…
June 30, 2025
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The Creed and a Christian Worldview

Anniversaries matter. If you’re a cancer survivor, each year of remission offers a fresh lease on life. If you’re married, every annual commemoration of your wedding is an opportunity to recommit to your vows. Your work anniversary may include a bonus or raise. The anniversary of a loved one’s death summons both grief and remembrance.…
June 27, 2025
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How Coaching Youth Sports Helped My Thinking about Christian Character

The most important activity that helped refine my view of character education was not taking classes on epistemology and ethics from Dallas Willard. Nor was it taking all my other Ph.D. classes that addressed virtue or moral development. It was coaching youth league sports. Granted, readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology led me to recognize…
June 25, 2025
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AI and the Grammar of Descent

Recently, there’s been even more press than usual about AI proliferation and its associated risks. The hype has been driven, in part, by the now infamous Ross Douthat interview with Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, in which Kokotajlo suggests that AI could take over civilization—and “then kill all the humans”—by 2027.…
June 24, 2025

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Atypical Conversations with Students about Their Research Projects

When I was a doctoral student, one mentor secretly sent their friend (another professor) to my poster at a professional conference to ask the most difficult methodological and statistical questions about my research content. I think my mentor viewed this as an initiation of some kind to the academic presentation experience. Suffice it to say,…
May 23, 2024
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On Going to Church: Mimesis and Magnificence

Recently, thanks to a collaboration with fellow CCCU school Gordon College, I was able to spend a month in Italy teaching art history to a wonderful group of Christian students. This was, of course, a priceless opportunity for an art historian. Italy abounds in stellar museums and archaeological sites, and over the years, I have…
May 21, 2024
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Christian Universities Do Little to Help Students Contemplate Excellent Christian Citizenship: Here’s the Evidence

Since it is an election year, I wondered if I could find evidence that Christian universities help their students contemplate excellent Christian citizenship. As mentioned in an earlier post, my research team examined the general education requirements at 231 Protestant colleges requiring at least one Bible or theology course. We chose these institutions because they showed…
May 17, 2024
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Can a Public Speaking Course Be Christian? Not According to Christian University Catalogs (with Only Six Exceptions)

Public speaking is one of the most common courses that one will find in the general education curriculum. Yet, we recently discovered that every Protestant university but six does not use a bit of Christian rhetoric when describing what they teach for that required class.In cases where the institution used a distribution model and allowed…
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Do Not Be Conformed to the World of Sports: Relearning How We Think about, Feel, and Do Sports as Christians (Part 3)

*This is part 3 of a three-part series. Part 1 utilized a salient real-world example to demonstrate the theological dangers brought about by the tendency for athletic performance to supersede Christian, moral excellence within the context of sports. Part 2 expands upon the bodily consequences of a misaligned allegiance to sports, which subvert the holistic…
May 15, 2024
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Do Not Be Conformed to the World of Sports: Relearning How We Think about, Feel, and Do Sports as Christians (Part 2)

*This is part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 utilized a salient real-world example to demonstrate the theological dangers brought about by the tendency for athletic performance to supersede Christian, moral excellence within the context of sports. Part 2 expands upon the bodily consequences of a misaligned allegiance to sports, which subvert the holistic…
May 14, 2024
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When Mother’s Day Meets the Ascension

The ascension of Jesus Christ to heaven may be in the creed and on the church calendar, but compared to Christmas, Easter, or even Pentecost, it doesn’t get much airtime (My apologies for the pun.).It has received growing attention from Christian scholars over the past century. The first study came out of Oxford’s circle of…
May 10, 2024