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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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BlogBook Review

Nurturing Faith: A Practical Theology for Educating Christians

This book is an admirable attempt to chart a “road map” for the discipleship and educational mission of the global, twenty-first century church. The authors identify their work as a “practical” theology because it seeks to inform the church’s practice through “self-conscious examination” of current practices (9). By “faith” the authors mean “a knowledge-based, conviction-established,…
March 30, 2023
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The Book I’d Give My Younger Self

If I could tell my college-aged self to read just one book, it would be The Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph B. Soloveitchik.It was published by Doubleday as a book in 2006, but its original form was an essay published in 1965 in Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 7:2 (Summer 1965). To minimize…
March 29, 2023
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I Don’t Want My Students to Be Well-rounded

I recently found myself explaining again the value of a liberal arts education. I fell into using the same language I have used for hundreds of other students over the years. I was offering the same sorts of justifications that were used on me as a biochemistry major in the 1990s when I was told…
March 28, 2023
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Why Faculty Need to Go Back to School: A Modern Viewpoint

It is a truism in higher education, especially at liberal-arts institutions, that interdisciplinary collaboration promotes academic excellence—that it forms well-rounded students and fosters communities of intellectual creativity. We want our students to combine ideas from multiple disciplines in order to be critical and flexible thinkers. They should study philosophy and literature so that they can…
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“An Eye for His Image”

Bill was one of my very best friends in college. We went to music school together, we played in bands, and we pledged a fraternity. Bill’s daughter, Kaylie is a graduate of the university where I currently teach and sang in our university choir. So as Bill and his wife Shelia would attend Kaylie’s choir…
March 24, 2023
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Better Together, Part Three: Literary Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

This series is adapted from a chapter in Keith Loftin’s Rekindling an Old Light: The Virtue and Value of Christ-Shaped Liberal Arts Learning (High Bridge Books, 2022, published in conjunction with Moral Apologetics Press). Literature can give us ears to hear and sensitize our eyes to see goodness, truth, and beauty—in fact to effect union…
March 22, 2023
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Better Together, Part Two: Reading Widely

This series is adapted from a chapter in Keith Loftin’s Rekindling an Old Light: The Virtue and Value of Christ-Shaped Liberal Arts Learning (High Bridge Books, 2022, published in conjunction with Moral Apologetics Press). Why should Christians read literature from a broad array of writers and thinkers? As our last installment put it, “If literature…
March 21, 2023
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Better Together, Part One: Why Christians Need Literature and Literature Needs Christians

This series is adapted from a chapter in Keith Loftin’s Rekindling an Old Light: The Virtue and Value of Christ-Shaped Liberal Arts Learning (High Bridge Books, 2022, published in conjunction with Moral Apologetics Press). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” begins harmlessly enough—with townspeople from a rural community gathering in the picturesque public square on an idyllic…
March 20, 2023