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Malleability in World Language Departments: One Case Study

The study of foreign languages in the United States has experienced a significant decline over the past few decades. According to the Modern Language Association (MLA), enrollment in college-level foreign-language courses dropped 9.2 percent from 2013 to 2016.Julian Wyllie, “Enrollment in Most Foreign-Language Programs Continues to Fall,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 7, 2018.…
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Cultivating Honest and Courageous Researchers: Teaching Statistics Through a Christian Virtue Lens

In recent years, the social sciences have faced a “replication crisis,” raising questions about how we conduct, report, and interpret research findings. A large-scale replication project in 2015 tried to recreate nearly 100 studies from recent publications and found only about 40% of attempts successfully replicated. This finding sent shock waves through the psychology community.…
August 7, 2025
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The In-between of the Faculty Summer

The faculty summer. You all know what I mean when I say that it’s a complicated phenomenon, right? I mean, think about it; we just completed a crazy spring semester (after getting through a crazy fall semester). As the end of the semester approaches, we start to slow down with the committees and other university…
August 6, 2025
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What the Secular School Has Rediscovered

In recent years, trauma-informed pedagogy has become a widely embraced framework in American education. Teachers and administrators are being trained to recognize signs of emotional dysregulation, respond with empathy rather than punishment, and prioritize safety and trust in classroom relationships. Terms like “fight or flight,” “toxic stress,” and “emotional regulation” have become common in professional…
August 5, 2025
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A Response to Miles Smith IV’s CSR Review of Another Gospel

Miles Smith IV begins his review of Another Gospel by telling the reader that the book is about Christian Nationalism—which, he writes, can mean “nearly anything” pastors, professors, or politicians find “exotic” at “the intersection of politics and religion.” At such a characterization, the discerning reader will likely raise an eyebrow. Surely this book must…

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Cognitive Neuroscientific Theism

In Leap of Faith (Paramount Pictures: 1992), Steve Martin offers a modern take on Elmer Gantry as conman and revivalist Jonas Nightengale. In the movie, Nightengale’s bus breaks down while in the small town of Rustwater, Kansas. As he waits for it to be fixed, he decides to run a series of tent meetings complete…
May 26, 2023
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Social Controversies in the Classroom: How to Put Learning First

Discussing emotionally charged social controversies in the classroom is one of the few parts of my job for which I feel really well-equipped. I just finished a teaching appointment in systematic theology, but I obtained my doctoral training in that field relatively late in life. My original doctoral training was in political philosophy. (I’m the…
May 24, 2023
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Much Ado About Theories: Teaching Marx and Other Suspicious Types in Christian Higher Education (Part 1)

I’ve taught an undergraduate sociological theory course for 20-some years, and it’s long been one of my favorites. Theories are fascinating phenomena. They can prod people to adjust their gaze, see things anew, step into the shoes of another, and occasionally even shift paradigms. Theories can delight, enrage, puzzle, unnerve, and challenge. They can move…
May 19, 2023
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Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry (Book Review)

Brad Leithauser’s new book, Rhyme’s Rooms, is a feast, a palace, a work of beauty that deserves a wide audience beyond the academy, as well as inclusion in any serious course on poetry. It also seems to be Christian scholarship of the best sort: serious intellectual work conversing in a rigorous and diverse secular profession,…
May 18, 2023
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Keeping First Things First: A Charge to Christian Academics

I teach literature today in no small part thanks to Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane’s realistic novella depicting the impoverished conditions of life in the Bowery at the turn of the twentieth century.This piece has been adapted from an address to the Sigma Tau Delta chapter of Liberty University, delivered March 10,…
May 17, 2023
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Ask for Christian Theorizing and a Christian Positionality Statement: A Proposal for Dissertations and Theses at Christian Universities

As mentioned in yesterday's post, my research undertaken with my graduate students has discovered that Christian graduate education is not very Christian. The marketing, objectives, and curriculum at two-thirds of programs show little sign of Christian influence. Our undergraduate programs may be different, but our graduate programs are really imitations of the secular programs from…
May 16, 2023
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Letter to the Class of 2023: Find Joy

“Are You Going to Go My Way?” Lenny Kravitz Dear Class of 2023, If there is a descriptor of the vice that older generations have perpetrated upon you at this moment, I would label it joylessness. Look at all the dystopian books you were fed growing up, The Hunger Games, Divergent, Mazerunner, Uglies, Matched, etc.…
May 12, 2023