Christian higher education currently neglects to teach students how to steward their bodies. How do I know? I recently led a mixed-methods study of Christian student affairs.Perry L. Glanzer et al., Christ-Enlivened Student Affairs: A Guide to Christian Thinking and Practice in the Field (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2020). In a national survey…

As the title makes plain, this is a how-to guide: how to inhabit time. But we already inhabit time. “Human beings dwell temporally,” Smith tells us (27). So, what is there to learn? The answer arises from reflection on the fact that our being in time, our temporality—despite constituting our essence as human beings—is often…

Zero. That’s the overwhelming response when I ask students to number the sermons they’ve heard on Satan or spiritual battle in the past year. If they are not getting this information from the pulpit, where will students hear about a topic so prevalent in the Scriptures? In the previous blog, we considered the biblical support…

“Demons, leave my students alone!” I confess, it’s almost as weird to write this, as it was to pray that day in my classroom in front of wide-eyed students. But, why? After all, I was a faith-professing professor lecturing to Christian students at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) on the topic of gendered…

In Leap of Faith (Paramount Pictures: 1992), Steve Martin offers a modern take on Elmer Gantry as conman and revivalist Jonas Nightengale. In the movie, Nightengale’s bus breaks down while in the small town of Rustwater, Kansas. As he waits for it to be fixed, he decides to run a series of tent meetings complete…

Perry Glanzer’s Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education is a sequel to his earlier 2022 book, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity.Perry L. Glanzer, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity (New York, NY: Rowan and Littlefield, 2022). Dismantling offered…

Discussing emotionally charged social controversies in the classroom is one of the few parts of my job for which I feel really well-equipped. I just finished a teaching appointment in systematic theology, but I obtained my doctoral training in that field relatively late in life. My original doctoral training was in political philosophy. (I’m the…

To follow my previous foray (See Much Ado About Theories Part 1) into how I approach a controversial theorist such as Marx, I’d like to briefly outline a teaching approach I inherited from my late mentor sociologist Russell Heddendorf. In Hidden Threads: A Christian Critique of Sociological Theory, he contrasted the approach taken by Karl…

I’ve taught an undergraduate sociological theory course for 20-some years, and it’s long been one of my favorites. Theories are fascinating phenomena. They can prod people to adjust their gaze, see things anew, step into the shoes of another, and occasionally even shift paradigms. Theories can delight, enrage, puzzle, unnerve, and challenge. They can move…

Brad Leithauser’s new book, Rhyme’s Rooms, is a feast, a palace, a work of beauty that deserves a wide audience beyond the academy, as well as inclusion in any serious course on poetry. It also seems to be Christian scholarship of the best sort: serious intellectual work conversing in a rigorous and diverse secular profession,…