One of the most intriguing parts about my job is exploring students’ understanding of their virtue development. Recently, our research team has asked college students to provide an example of when they engaged in a virtuous act (e.g., sacrificial love, patience, generosity). We then enquired about what motivated them or helped them carry out the…

Miles Smith IV begins his review of Another Gospel by telling the reader that the book is about Christian Nationalism—which, he writes, can mean “nearly anything” pastors, professors, or politicians find “exotic” at “the intersection of politics and religion.” At such a characterization, the discerning reader will likely raise an eyebrow. Surely this book must…

This July marks the one hundredth anniversary of the most famous event in the history of American religion and science, the trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a rural Tennessee high school. The rookie teacher was convicted of violating a new state law prohibiting public schools “to teach any theory that denies the…

I am currently co-writing with Jason Duesing a biography of the great missionary Adoniram Judson. It is due to Crossway in mid-2026. Judson is best known for translating the whole Bible into Burmese. This monumental translation is still used today in the Baptist churches of Myanmar (Burma). Judson also maintained an impressive fitness regimen, one…

As I write this post, our sailboat is tied up in a small public marina in British Columbia, twenty-five nautical miles north of the city of Vancouver, on a sunny weekday morning. However, just outside the harbor, twenty-knot winds with forty-knot gusts are whipping up three-foot whitecaps, and even in the harbor, our boat is…

Writing in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Hans Sanders tells the story of Cris Hassold of New College Florida.Hank Sanders, “A Professor’s Final Gift to Her Students: Her Life Savings,” New York Times, May 11, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/us/cris-hassold-professor-new-college-will.html. A story that in so many ways captures the best of what the university can provide…

The title is a good summary of two key objectives of this book. Kennedy is against the idea of a Christian worldview as developed largely by Reformed philosophers and theologians. Here, he joins a growing chorus of writers who have raised concerns about how the worldview approach has come to dominate evangelical Christian education. While…

My friend once said to me: I think living faithfully would be easy if we could only perceive what is faithful. That is, to discern the correct path is a harder task than to walk it. Knowing which way to go and what to do is more challenging than the going and the doing. Jesus…

That sense of nagging fear  There is a nagging fear I experience sometimes. I’m tempted to attribute it to something earthly and circumstantial - some specific, mundane event or condition that, once solved, will make the fear go away. But I know better now. This fear is repetitive and familiar. Finally, I begin to recognize…

In Priests of History, Sarah Irving-­Stonebraker diagnoses a partial cause of the identity crisis currently plaguing Western culture, generally, and the Western Church, particularly. We do not know ourselves because we have neglected the past. We are “ahistorical,” a term used by Irving-­Stonebraker to describe the loss of “meaningful engagement with, and connection to, history”…