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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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Do Protestant Universities Need Vice Presidents for Christian Mission? Why I Have Changed My Answer

In my research on Christian higher education, I have found that one of the most important differences between Protestant and Catholic institutions pertains to their executive leadership teams.See for example two recent publications, Perry L. Glanzer, Theodore F. Cockle, Jessica Martin, and Scott Alexander, “Getting Rid of “Church-Related” Colleges and Universities: Applying a New Operationalizing…
April 21, 2023
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You Can’t Have a Telos of NO

A telos means what something is for, the ultimate end at which it aims. The telos of an acorn is to be an oak tree. The telos of a human community is to enable the flourishing of its members, and ultimately of the whole human family. Christianity maintains that the telos of a human being…
April 19, 2023
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The Challenges of Writing about Teaching

This piece is a slightly adapted version of a recent editorial written for the International Journal of Christianity and Education. In the preface to his recent book Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching,Mark D. Jordan, Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Mark Jordan (2021) recalls his experiences as a young teacher who “found many…
April 17, 2023
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Purgatory: What to Make of a Gifted Athlete? Three Parables (Part 2)

In yesterday's post, I maintained that our talents are, just like our very lives, gifts from God. Recognizing that our lives and talents are gifts has three important implications for athletes: gifts must be cultivated, gifts are temporary, and gifts must be used well. These facts—regarding the nature and purpose of athletic gifts—are not often…
April 11, 2023
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Purgatory: What to Make of a Gifted Athlete? (Part 1)

In my last post, I focused on the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno. There I attempted to draw lessons out of Dante’s text regarding the place of courage in sport. Here, I want to extend the examination to the second book of the Divine Comedy, the Purgatory. In this post, I will…
April 10, 2023
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On Deserts and Discipline: For Lent

In the Seattle Art Museum, there is a little painting that often perplexes my students. It shows a scrawny, aged, half-nude man kneeling on desert ground and facing a small crucifix mounted on a stick. His left arm is extended with its empty hand splayed; his right hand holds a gray, prism-shaped rock. And despite…
April 7, 2023
BlogBook Review

Playing as Others: Theology and Ethical Responsibility in Video Games

Since their inception, video games have often been viewed as trivial or unworthy of significant theological study. However, Benjamin Chicka argues that this posture is a mistake: video games represent powerful cultural artifacts that possess the potential for tremendous theological depth, and they provide us with new vistas of ethical possibilities. Whereas most serious theological…
April 6, 2023
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Historicizing The Scarlet Letter and COVID-19

Earlier today as I was scrolling through my phone’s camera roll, I paused at pictures of March 2021. My son and daughter, five and six then, were masked at the grocery store in the canned vegetables section. The next picture was them a few months later, masked at the playground. As I scrolled through the…
April 5, 2023