On July 4, 2026, Dr. Robert B. Sloan, Jr., President of Houston Christian University, was called home to be with the Lord Christ after nearly two decades leading HCU. His leadership was marked by faithfulness to Christian higher education and a vision for a university rigorous in pursuit yet no less faithful in commitment. My…

“Elite culture” is a dubious thing. It can often feel like a harmful construct designed to keep control of those who already have it. If this view is correct, then there’s nothing excellent, or even especially better, about elite culture - it’s only a code deployed by those “in the know” to exclude others. Not…

Recently, especially after Elon Musk passed the trillionaire mark, many people posted online about the ways Musk’s money could help the poor. Others, including famous politicians, then chimed in about what could be done with lots of billionaires' money. Unsurprisingly, no one posted about what they were currently doing with their money or other possessions…

A rabbi friend was leading a series of evening discussions about the Sinai commandments for folks in his synagogue, and he invited me to join him in the session dealing with coveting. Some business scandals were much in the news at the time, so we did give some attention to the topic of greed in…

For many Christian scholars, disability studies rarely come to mind when they think about the future of theological and missiological discourse. Yet it should. Globally, individuals with disabilities are among the largest unreached groups, with an estimated 90–95% never having encountered the gospel. In the United States, almost 59% do attend a religious service (2).…

A student I knew well confided in me last year, reporting that she was experiencing emotional distress related to trauma from her early childhood and needed an extension on an assignment. I did not doubt the veracity of the student’s report, nor did I feel it was my role to probe further into her struggles.…

As mentioned in a post last month, one thing I have noticed over my twenty-four years of graduate teaching at a Christian university is this: Undergraduates from secular universities come into our programs focused on figuring out how to be a Christian in the world, since that has been their experience and pressing need. Indeed,…

Jonathan Haidt has called this generation of students “The Anxious Generation.” That’s an interesting choice of words. Kierkegaard thought that anxiety is what we feel when we become aware that we are, despite everything we can point to as an excuse, fundamentally free, and therefore fundamentally responsible. We feel anxiety because we know we’re free;…

One Sunday in the 1950s, when I was in my teens, my uncle and aunt had joined my parents for refreshments after our Sunday evening church service. Before the delicacies were ready, my dad guided my uncle downstairs to my basement aviary and aquarium room to see my nesting parakeets and tropical fish. As they…