Part I: Truth My colleague had just finished delivering a public lecture on the challenge that intersex persons—those born with a mix of male and female organs, chromosomes, and hormones—present to the church. A perturbed member of the audience was expressing his disapproval of her call for the Christian church to understand, affirm, and welcome…

If you follow trends in software engineering, you may have encountered the term “vibe coding,” recently popularized by Andrej Karpathy, deep learning researcher and OpenAI co-founder.Kevin, R. (2025, February 27). Not a Coder? With A.I., Just Having an Idea Can Be Enough. New York Times. This is how he defines the approach: There’s a new kind…

Economists generally don’t like tariffs. This was true even before the latest round of tariffs implemented by President Donald Trump. Various surveys have found that around 90 percent of economists believe that tariffs will negatively impact economic welfare, and a similar amount believe that tariffs lead to inflation.As just one example, see https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/framing-next-four-years-tariffs-tax-cuts-and-other-uncertainties-trump. This is…

It is time to look around the corner As in all other spheres of higher education, religious colleges and universities today are experiencing a transformation. These schools must chart a path forward in a complex environment marred by a growing mistrust of the academy, increased skepticism about the value of a college degree, and a…

As Part 1 of this post series mentioned, the liberal arts in early American Christian liberal arts colleges were usually not taught Christianly. By that, I mean they were not framed or analyzed within the larger Christian story or set forth as serving the theologically-articulated end of restoring the image of God and helping further our…

If you ask almost any student or professor what the purpose of the liberal arts is, they will likely not give you an explicitly theologically informed answer. Instead, they will likely discuss how  “it fosters critical thinking,” or helps one “adopt different approaches to understanding,” or “trains one’s mind to be agile.”For samples of this…

I just finished watching the series A Small Light (currently available on Amazon Prime) with my wife and 17-year-old daughter. The three of us are going to the Netherlands in a few days, me for a conference and a bit of sightseeing, and the two of them exclusively for sightseeing during my daughter’s spring break.…

Author’s note: As I read about President Trump’s recent executive order declaring English as the official language of the United States and reflected on its potential implications, I was reminded of a podcast episode in which I interviewed Dr. Grace Inae Blum.  Dr. Blum teaches and writes about humanizing teacher education, teacher preparation for culturally…

Conversations surrounding the practical use of artificial intelligence in student academic work seem to be less straight-forward than those having to do with plagiarism.This is not to say considerations about plagiarism should be one-dimensional. For thoughtful considerations dealing with these topics, I highly recommend Rachel B. Griffis, “Plagiarism as the Language of Ownership: Aligning Academic…