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Gather Up the Leftovers. Let Nothing Go to Waste.

Americans waste food on a grand scale. Though figures are appalling–30-40% of our food supply gets wasted, by USDA estimates, about 60 million tons a year, worth over $200 billion – big numbers fail to change behavior. First-year students in a seminar I teach on the history of American diet trends are reliably conscientious about…
June 30, 2025
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The Creed and a Christian Worldview

Anniversaries matter. If you’re a cancer survivor, each year of remission offers a fresh lease on life. If you’re married, every annual commemoration of your wedding is an opportunity to recommit to your vows. Your work anniversary may include a bonus or raise. The anniversary of a loved one’s death summons both grief and remembrance.…
June 27, 2025
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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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The Secular University’s Problematic Justifications for General Education: But Christians Need to Provide Better Alternatives and Not Simply a Better Justification

If you want to learn about the secular university’s pitiful justifications for general education, you simply need to read the recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Repairing General Education: Colleges Struggle to Answer the Question, ‘Why Am I Taking This Class?’” The author accurately writes, “Many students and more than a few professors see general…
June 16, 2023
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Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith. Foreword by Makoto Fujimura (Book Review)

Though few of us have the patience to really contemplate them, great pictures are rich “icons” of human nature. They are considered great precisely because they contain timeless, complex, interlocking truths in one small “box.” They are the world’s most dazzlingly efficient form of deep, rich, and instantaneous-yet-endless communication. The old platitude says “a picture…
June 15, 2023
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How a Christian Changed One Skeptical Scholar’s Mind: The Power of Patient Friendship

In the early twentieth century, American archeology was dominated by radical skepticism toward the Bible. One academic leader perpetuating this approach early in his career was the famed American archaeologist, William Foxwell Albright. Yet, the establishment of an intellectual friendship initiated by an older evangelical archeologist would eventually lead Albright to abandon his radical skepticism…
June 13, 2023
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Valedictory 2023

“We are not living in an era of change, but a change of era.” - Pope Francis Written on the Feast of Pentecost. Graduation is coming here at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). (Our school year in the PNW starts and ends late compared to the rest of the U.S.). Graduation, of course, is a time…
June 12, 2023
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Listen to Their Stories Like They’re Your Children

This past year our university was blessed with a record enrollment of incoming freshmen. Consequently, I taught the largest class of nursing students ever. According to the CDC, they have the tragic distinction of being the class with the highest rates of sadness, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. As a father of four, with two…
June 9, 2023
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The Bodily Stewardship Crisis in Christian Higher Education: And a New Resource for Addressing It

Christian higher education currently neglects to teach students how to steward their bodies. How do I know? I recently led a mixed-methods study of Christian student affairs.Perry L. Glanzer et al., Christ-Enlivened Student Affairs: A Guide to Christian Thinking and Practice in the Field (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2020). In a national survey…
June 5, 2023