A self-identifying evangelical Christian college that welcomed prominent theologically conservative and liberal Protestants scholars and pastors to campus for a Bible conference might defy the expectations of many today. But this happened annually at Grove City College during the tenure of its founding president Isaac Ketler’s annual Bible conference in the late nineteenth and early…

Crossing Cultures with the Gospel is about just that, and its wisdom and insight easily extends into Christian college and university classrooms of all subjects. Miriam Adeney’s foreword sums up the book perfectly: Whiteman’s charisma and vitality distilled into wisdom that can be put into practice. Drawing from nearly a half-century of missionary experience, including…

I have spent the majority of my training and professional career in large public universities. In fact, from kindergarten through PhD and the first thirteen years of my academic career were in public institutions.  So I received little training on faith integration and Christ-animated learning during those periods.  However, when I arrived at Samford University…

This blog post explores the intersection of faith and business education by incorporating "spiritual assignments" within the framework of a modern business school curriculum. I aim to share the possible connection between these two realms and shed light on educators' invaluable assistance in fostering students’ comprehension of this connection. In this post I will prompt…

How does a Christian university change a culture and overcome fear, differences of opinions, and a faculty body comprised of diverse Christian traditions? How does the university guard against implementing an administratively-driven, plug-and-play approach to faith and learning integration that would infringe on the faculty member’s academic freedom? The starting point for us at Samford…

What is—what should be—the Christian’s role in politics? There is no easy answer to this question. The present agitation among evangelicals in this election year recalls a debate extending back centuries. In the 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church and the kings of Europe were locked in a contentious alliance—each side trying to maneuver into a…

If I were forced to select a single passage from C. S. Lewis’s hefty corpus that sums up most fully his genius for uniting reason and imagination, for exposing the fault lines in the monolith of modernism, and for expressing profound insights in the simplest of terms, I would choose one that occurs in Chapter…

One of the exercises that I often have both classroom students and survey respondents do is to prioritize their identities. I first ask them to consider the range of identities they might apply to themselves, and then I ask them to rank their top three. I find the answers produce significant clarity about my audience,…

I think human beings are built to want to impress someone. To please someone. To get approval. It’s there, palpably, in everyone’s eyes, if you know how to look. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this - nothing at all. It’s built into the tripartite structure of the Trinity, wherein Father and Son gaze upon each…

Part-way through teaching a new course on faith and pedagogy last year I noticed an emerging pattern that had not been a fully conscious part of my plan. An unanticipated trend slowly turned into a conscious strategy that threaded its way through several major topics. It started a few weeks into the semester as we…