I am grateful to the editors of Christian Scholar’s Review for their invitation to guest edit a special issue of the journal, focusing on vocation and higher education. Although vocation is an important theological concept, it has had a complicated historical sojourn; it therefore requires some unpacking. At various times and in various contexts, the…

Is a student demonstrating a skill in the lab enough to consider that student competent? Can the student then demonstrate proficiency in that skill in a clinical setting without the aid of faculty? How much reinforcement is needed to help a student obtain competency? These are just some of the typical questions that float around…

In the first essay in this series, we presented the notion that within interdisciplinary work “we each represent our own discipline, but we are all working for the same Kingdom.” This second essay in this three-part series is presented from the disciplines of education and behavior analysis. The unique gift of the education department is…

For all their economic vulnerabilities, small Christian colleges, and universities might be the ideal environment for fostering interdisciplinary research. Given that the realities of size, scale, scope, and student load can serve to restrict the kind of projects faculty at these institutions can carry out, it makes sense to recognize our strength in this niche…

As recounted in the previous post, Oppenheimer fixated on a rather limited view of the academic vocation. While limited in scope, such a view allowed him to pursue noteworthy excellence. He experienced an especially triumphant phase between the time he accepted his joint appointment at UC Berkeley and Cal Tech and the time he resigned…

Based on the review of Oppenheimer biographies we offered in the last two posts, a set of common themes begins to come to the surface. These themes bring into greater relief how Oppenheimer developed a fragmented understanding of the academic vocation, and what we can do to cultivate a healthier version of it. First, all…

The vocational fragmentation we noted in yesterday’s post summarizing some prominent Oppenheimer biographies likely had deeper roots going back to Oppenheimer’s childhood. David C. Cassidy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century offers important details concerning the impact of Oppenheimer’s upbringing on his sense of vocation. Cassidy contends that Oppenheimer’s parents considered it to be…

However, it is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.United States Atomic Energy Commission, In…

On Friday, the largest-scale exploration of the American academic vocation will hit theaters. With a rumored marketing budget of $100 million, few of us likely avoided the campaign NBCUniversal unleashed in recent weeks for Christopher Nolan’s next film, Oppenheimer. Viewers of Wimbledon and Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, for example, were repeatedly introduced to snippets…

For those whose lives are marked by the rhythms of the academic calendar, time unfolds not as a continuous combination of ordinary and festal days, but instead as a simple alternation of months wherein one is or is not “in school.” For many academics, it is the time not in school which carries with it…