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How Coaching Youth Sports Helped My Thinking about Christian Character

The most important activity that helped refine my view of character education was not taking classes on epistemology and ethics from Dallas Willard. Nor was it taking all my other Ph.D. classes that addressed virtue or moral development. It was coaching youth league sports. Granted, readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology led me to recognize…
June 25, 2025
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AI and the Grammar of Descent

Recently, there’s been even more press than usual about AI proliferation and its associated risks. The hype has been driven, in part, by the now infamous Ross Douthat interview with Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, in which Kokotajlo suggests that AI could take over civilization—and “then kill all the humans”—by 2027.…
June 24, 2025
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God Made All Nations from One Blood: The Origins of a Biblical Argument against Slavery

In 1526, William Tyndale’s ground-breaking translation of the English New Testament appeared. In this translation, Tyndale used a unique phrase that was not in John Wycliffe’s original English translation. Instead of translating a key passage from Paul’s sermon to the Athenians in Wycliffe’s original way, “ made of one all the kind of men” (Acts…
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Mirrors Transformed by Light:Meditations on the God Who Is Light

I’d like to propose a thought experiment -- one that may transform your understanding of something you see every day. Thought experiments can change the world, or at least your understanding of it. Einstein’s great scientific breakthroughs started with a thought experiment, something like this one. For our experiment, imagine how a mirror works. If…

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J. Robert Oppenheimer: An Autopsy of the American Academic Vocation, Part 1

On Friday, the largest-scale exploration of the American academic vocation will hit theaters. With a rumored marketing budget of $100 million, few of us likely avoided the campaign NBCUniversal unleashed in recent weeks for Christopher Nolan’s next film, Oppenheimer. Viewers of Wimbledon and Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, for example, were repeatedly introduced to snippets…
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The Biblical Worldview and Libraries, Part 5: Library Personnel

This is the last in a series of posts that apply four frames of the biblical narrative—Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation—to the realm of libraries. As I explained in the first post, the series is based in part on the work of a discussion group that convened in my workplace earlier this year. In subsequent…
July 12, 2023
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What If All Our Residence Halls Were Tech Free?

This May I taught a summer course called “Technology and Freedom.” We read many of the usual suspects, including some great Christian critics of technology like Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul. But the course wasn’t really about ideas. Informally we called it “the tech-free dorm course.” The students spent the entire month living together in…
July 10, 2023
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The Biblical Worldview and Libraries, Part 3: Library Resources

This post is the third of a five-part series. In the first post I described how I met with a group of colleagues earlier this year to explore implications of the biblical worldview for the realm of libraries. Our discussion drew on four “frames” of the biblical narrative: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. In the…
June 28, 2023