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Our Problems with Sin

The animated comments came quickly to a simple email survey. The survey was sent last fall to a handful of seasoned student development leaders of Council of Christian Colleges and Universities institutions. Their answers illuminate the realities of managing student conduct, and maybe more importantly for all of us, it provides insight into current students’…
June 16, 2026
Blog

Don’t Let the Cheaters, the Slackers, and the Cutters Steal Your Joy

In light of Princeton University’s recent reinstatement of proctors during final exam week due to widespread cheating involving artificial intelligence on students’ cellphones,1 I wasn’t surprised to receive the following email from one of my chemistry students: Dear Professor Rummo, I’m using a random email because I don’t want this to reflect badly on me.…
June 15, 2026
Blog

Looking for Christ in Grand Canyon and Liberty University’s Online Degrees

Half a million students attend institutions associated with either the Council for Christian Colleges (CCCU) or the International Association of Christian Education (IACE). Twenty percent of those half a million students are enrolled in Liberty University (LU). In addition, there are over 220 thousand students enrolled in other Protestant universities that are not associated with…
June 12, 2026
Blog

Finding Ourselves

As an art historian, I often begin my courses with a discussion of metanarratives: big picture, “mythic” structures that shape values and give meaning. There are metanarratives of “progress” (like American “Manifest Destiny”) and metanarratives of cyclical return (like the medieval “four ages of man:” birth, maturity, decline, death). And for some of us, especially…
June 11, 2026
Blog

Seeing the Image of God in Everyone: Reducing Prejudice Through Imago Dei

For decades, social psychologists have acknowledged that prejudice starts as early as children start perceiving the world,1 with some literature citing that children start showing a preference for their own race as early as three months old.2 More recent literature suggests that own-group preference may not be equivalent to prejudice against out-groups, as evidenced by…
June 10, 2026
Blog

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: Then and Now

Editor's Note: The following is a book excerpt from the new edited volume: From the Outrageous to the Scandalous: Re-imagining Christian Thinking and Scholarship in an Age of Tribalism and Ideological Resentment, eds. Robert H. Woods Jr. and Mark Allan Steiner. The assignment that I’ve been given is to attempt an assessment, now more than a…
June 9, 2026

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Blog

Recognizing Self and Others in an Age of Generative AI

In recent years, it has been our technology that has “recognized” us. Our smartphones and laptops are unlocked by fingerprint readers, virtual assistants, like Siri and Alexa, are activated by our voices, and facial recognition technology scans our faces in various security contexts. Recognition and identification technology became prominent, especially with the rise of modern…
March 19, 2025
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Seeing the Unseen: Authentic Leadership Within Faculty Struggle

If you’ve read my last two blogs (see here and here), you know what I’m all about: Authenticity and the undergraduate disabled student community. That is my thing. And, since stretching out my baby research legs after my dissertation a few years ago, my passion for this underrepresented population has only grown. I was on…
March 18, 2025
Blog

A Model Professor

As an Associate Dean of my college I am on a 12-month contract, so the academic calendar doesn’t impact my work schedule as much as it does many faculty. All the same, I am a very different figure on campus during the semester than I am when most of the students have gone home. During…
March 17, 2025
BlogReviews

A Review of Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians

I cannot decide if Amy-­Jill Levine’s recent book, Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians, is properly or poorly titled. To be sure, the reason for the wording is obvious. It is a book about Jesus written primarily for those who would not self-­identify as Christians. Levine notes in her introduction that she writes “to atheists,…
March 13, 2025
Blog

The Blame Game: Moving Beyond Simple Attributions in Higher Education

I had a brilliant idea. My students were going to solve REAL LIFE PROBLEMS. It was a business communications course with a dozen undergrads. I put them in groups, used some scenarios from the textbook company, and sent them off to do a multi-week project to create a business proposal. What could go wrong? Apparently,…
March 12, 2025
BlogEditor's Preface

Introducing the Winter 2025 Issue of CSR

Pulling together each Christian Scholar’s Review issue is a labor of love and a labor-intensive team effort. Usually, at the end of my prefaces, I thank one of our transitioning team members, but I’m not sure how many people make it to the end of my quarterly missives. So, this time around, I start with…
March 11, 2025
Blog

Teaching About Racial Colorblindness: Some Strategies, Struggles, and Confessions

As someone who teaches about the psychological pitfalls of racial colorblindness, it’s been jolting to see this ideology being touted as an ideal way of relating to one another. For example, President Trump has repeatedly used this term, including during his inauguration speech. Recently, against the backdrop of the current public sentiments about racial colorblindness,…
March 10, 2025
Blog

Rethinking the Promotion of Adaptation in the University

Like most college professors in this Year of our Lord 2025, I sometimes think about what I would do if my position got the axe. I never come up with any good ideas, and my institution is relatively healthy, so I usually just let it go and get on with my work. Tomorrow will take…
March 7, 2025
Blog

Creating and Redeeming Institutions: A Christian Approach

“All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.” Rousseau, Emile, Book 1 In the last decade, politicians, academics, and activists have called for abolishing various institutions (e.g., “abolish the police,” “abolish USAID”). These calls emerge out of the declining trust in almost every institution, which is at a historic low for particular institutions…
March 6, 2025