In 1994 and 1995, I traveled to seventeen different cities in Russia and Ukraine to study a ground-breaking undertaking. Known as The CoMission, it was a vast partnership of Western mission groups, parachurch groups, and denominations that sought to educate former Soviet public educators who taught communist ethics on how to teach Christian ethics. It…

In my first post in this series, I explained how I convened a group of colleagues to explore the implications of the biblical worldview for the realm of libraries, using a four-frame model of the biblical narrative: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. Drawing on insights from the group’s discussion, I outlined in two additional posts…

When visiting Australia this past year, I happened to catch a taxi ride with an Australian citizen from India who began asking about my religious background. That encounter led to a fascinating conversation about his own Christian experience. He converted to Christianity in India as a teenager and then sought to witness to a group…

“A man may have to die for his country, but no man must, in an exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.”…

This post is the third of a five-part series. In the first post I described how I met with a group of colleagues earlier this year to explore implications of the biblical worldview for the realm of libraries. Our discussion drew on four “frames” of the biblical narrative: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. In the…

C. S. Lewis wrestled with liberalism in the Anglican Church in his day in the same way orthodox Anglicans still wrestle with Anglican liberalism.In the latest row between conservative and liberal theologians over LGBT issues, conservative Anglican leaders said, “they could no longer recognize England’s archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals and called for…

Throughout my career in higher education, teaching ethics had a strong academic feel. It is a fascinating discipline with one of the richest literary traditions of any area of study. It did not, however, carry the sense of urgency that other subjects seemed to hold. It was more important in an eternal sense than in…

In a recent blog post, I addressed the sloppy, alarmist reporting about the state of Christian higher education in the United States. The actual trajectory of religious higher education between 2010 and 2019 involved only minuscule decline (-0.1%) and that decline was much less than the -4% enrollment decline among secular universities. In other words,…

Almost forty years ago Alvin Plantinga’s memorable “Advice to Christian Philosophers” set out a three-fold challenge to encourage members of his own academic tribe, but also “Christian intellectuals generally.” First, “to display . . . more independence of the rest of the philosophical world”; second, to “display more integrity in the sense of integral wholeness”;…

This post is the second of a five-part series. The initial segment of the series described how I and seven of my colleagues at Liberty University met regularly in the early months of 2023 to examine the realm of libraries from a distinctively biblical worldview. Specifically, we considered the implications of four “frames” of the…