It feels like students have stopped coming to my office hours. Or at least, the number of office hour appointments on my calendar has slowed to a trickle. What might explain the underutilization of office hours? I chalk it up to multiple factors. It could be that the articulated benefits of meeting with professors outside…

It is a great time to graduate college in America. Unemployment rates are hovering at around 3.7%, as low as they have been since the 1960s and approaching what economists would consider full employment.Niasse, Amina. "Unemployment rises in nearly a third of US states in December." Reuters. January 23, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/unemployment-rose-nearly-third-us-states-december-2024-01-23/. The hot job market…

No metaphor is perfect, but the most iconic metaphor in biology, the metaphor that might be the only thing you remember from high school biology, is one that conveys almost no information at all. I am talking about calling mitochondria the “powerhouse.” When the lights go out in a storm, no one ever says, “There…

“It just wears you out being with nice people,” Stanley Hauerwas points out in a 2019 YouTube video. Having lived in the South most of his life, he likely knows this reality from experience. As Hauerwas did not describe the genesis of such feelings, I will suggest four reasons why this reality is the case.…

“Nice” is not an English word used in any serious Bible translation and “being nice” is certainly not a biblical virtue. Although its close cousin, kindness, is a Christian virtue, being nice is to Christian kindness what being empathetic is to Christian compassion. It is a partial secular substitute for the more robust Christian virtue…

In yesterday’s post, I recounted Burtchaell’s argument about the threats to Christian higher education and my response recorded in the book, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.Robert Benne Quality with Soul : How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI:…

During my sabbatical year of 1985–86 at St. Edmunds College of Cambridge University, I had the good fortune of having many conversations about Christian higher education with James Burtchaell, who also had a year-long sabbatical there. He had recently moved from the provost’s office of Notre Dame to its theology department. I had moved in…

I had the pleasure of addressing the St. Andrew’s Society of Savannah on November 30, 2023, on the occasion of their 286th St. Andrew’s Day Dinner. A friend had suggested me as the speaker because I had written a three-volume biography of C. S. Lewis. Lewis was a lovely man with many fine qualities, but…

This year, at my daughter’s suburban, mostly upper-income middle school, a certain kind of water bottle has become au courant. It is expensive and unwieldy, but there’s a sense that one can’t do without it. I found out today that another, nearby middle school (no surprise) is aflutter about the same bottle. To be deprived…

It has been just over a year now since ChatGPT’s release, and the shock waves from that seismic event keep rippling through society at large. One means of measuring its impact on our collective imagination is by the number of notifications my faculty inbox has received for professional articles and workshops on generative AI, or…