1981. I stared at this collection of digits for a few moments, letting the gravity of the moment sink in. This was the birth year that a student listed for her parents on a cultural genogram project; it is also the year that I was born. Throughout the years that I have assigned this project…

"'God’s Image cut, or carved in Ebony,' was a phrase first used, we believe by the English Church Historian, Fuller …and assuredly this phrase is among the most striking of the graphic sentences which he stamped so deeply on the republic of letters. There it stands, this beautiful and appropriate piece of imagery, and there…

If you want to learn about the secular university’s pitiful justifications for general education, you simply need to read the recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Repairing General Education: Colleges Struggle to Answer the Question, ‘Why Am I Taking This Class?’” The author accurately writes, “Many students and more than a few professors see general…

Though few of us have the patience to really contemplate them, great pictures are rich “icons” of human nature. They are considered great precisely because they contain timeless, complex, interlocking truths in one small “box.” They are the world’s most dazzlingly efficient form of deep, rich, and instantaneous-yet-endless communication. The old platitude says “a picture…

Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a five-part series that will appear every Wednesday for the next five weeks. Archives and libraries are known from manuscript and archeological evidence to have existed in the Ancient Near East long before the time of Abraham, and they clearly played important roles in the Greco-Roman world.For…

In the early twentieth century, American archeology was dominated by radical skepticism toward the Bible. One academic leader perpetuating this approach early in his career was the famed American archaeologist, William Foxwell Albright. Yet, the establishment of an intellectual friendship initiated by an older evangelical archeologist would eventually lead Albright to abandon his radical skepticism…

“We are not living in an era of change, but a change of era.” - Pope Francis Written on the Feast of Pentecost. Graduation is coming here at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). (Our school year in the PNW starts and ends late compared to the rest of the U.S.). Graduation, of course, is a time…

This past year our university was blessed with a record enrollment of incoming freshmen. Consequently, I taught the largest class of nursing students ever. According to the CDC, they have the tragic distinction of being the class with the highest rates of sadness, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. As a father of four, with two…

Jesus was once asked “Who is my neighbor?” His answer was to tell a story about caring for an enemy, implying that his followers are to serve others in spite of any social barriers between them. Matthew S. Vos explores such barriers as he examines the theme of “the stranger” in sociological theory, Christian theology,…

It was a Tuesday after Saturday’s graduation events. My assistant brought the day’s mail into my office and set the pile in front of me. She had tossed away the obvious junk mail and had taken the correspondence that I needed to deal with out of the envelopes. “I did not open this one,” she…