Remember all of that negative press about Christian Higher Education (CHE) declining? (see my posts on this topic here, here, and here). The just-released IPEDs Fall 2023 enrollment numbers should hopefully put a rest to that story for at least a year. The good news is that even though higher education as a whole faces…

Editor’s Note: After reading a couple of our posts about the stewardship of the body problem in Christian higher education (see here and here), Brad Bloom who publishes the Faith and Fitness Magazine, thought our audience might be interested in reading about how they are thinking about the subject for the popular fitness audience. Yesterday and today's posts are reproduced…

Editor's Note: After reading a couple of our posts about the stewardship of the body problem in Christian higher education (see here and here), Brad Bloom, who publishes the Faith & Fitness Magazine, thought our audience might be interested in reading about how they are encouraging the popular fitness audience to think Christianly about the subject.…

I have a complicated relationship with seasonal Christmas shops. I’ll bet a lot of us do. It began in the 1990s. Like most adolescents, I developed a contrarian streak when it came to the elders’ sacred cows. December rituals around Christmas Tree Shops (or their copycats) were no exception. I had a lot of reasons…

While doing some interviews among leaders and faculty at a Catholic institution this past year, I heard the phrase, “Charity is clarity” used among administrators. I loved the phrase since I think it accurately captures how ambiguity in Christian teaching, scholarship, and administration is often a failure to love. I think the phrase can also…

One of the oddest and most interesting educational developments during the past few decades is Protestants’ embrace of classical education at both the K-12 and higher education levels. What makes it odd is that certain Protestant Reformers thought key elements of classical education were suspect. After all, they attributed the too-friendly embrace of some of…

I ended last year with some reflections on how to end a semester. Here I offer some reflections on how to begin one. They were provoked by a chance encounter with an introductory Spanish grammar text. It begins with these two sentences:“Grammar is one of the most difficult (read: boring!) parts of learning a language.…

Starting around the year 1400, a new kind of Nativity Scene began to grace European art – and Italian Renaissance art, particularly. Before, Nativity scenes often featured Mary holding a swaddled baby Jesus and surrounded by animals and worshippers in a stable. The new formula, however, showed the baby Jesus lying naked on the ground,…

Imagine a single snowflake—albeit a giant one that encompasses 196,880+ dimensions. That’s the word-picture used by Mark Ronan to describe “the monster,” an extraordinarily large, complex numerical entity discovered by mathematicians in their hunt for mathematical symmetries, and one that may shed light on the deep structure of the cosmos itself.Mark Ronan, Symmetry and the…

Contra to Spencer’s demand for orthodoxy, Creation Care Discipleship commits a chapter to “Ecumenical Insights,” drawing on wisdom from representative socially conscious Christian lineages. Providing a brief overview of denominational contributions, Chapter 4 leads with the visions of Pope Francis, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I, and Lutheran ethicist Paul Santmire. Bouma-­Prediger carefully selects generally applicable…