When I teach our Natural Sciences Capstone seminar class, I must give the graduating seniors a challenging, cumulative assignment, appropriate to a 1-credit seminar course that meets once a week. In my class, these opposing requirements are met by assigning them to write a two-page proposal for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program…

In April, the actions of the Washington state legislature were discussed on the SPU faculty e-mail list, which might be a first. We celebrated as SB 5848 “Concerning licensure for music therapists” passed.Congratulations to my colleagues Carlene Brown, Christopher Hanson, Evelyn Stagnaro, Bobbie Childers, and others for their hard work to accomplish this. The bill…

Christianity is best understood as a religion that requires integration throughout a believer’s life. Scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 10:31 and James 1:8 warn against compartmentalizing one’s life into sacred areas that are subject to God’s requirements and secular areas that are outside His purview. Christian business faculty have long called on our students to…

“I will endeavor by a very simple and commonplace method to lead you by experience into the divine darkness,” wrote Nicholas of Cusa in 1453 to the monks at Tegernsee.Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God (New York: Cosimo, 2016), 2. In 2023, our faculty/staff reading group discussed Nicholas’s method in a conference room with…

I am continually amazed at how provincial and specialized contemporary graduate education is. By provincial and specialized, I mean that there is usually little interdisciplinary conversation that takes place within the curricula. Unfortunately, Christianity graduate education, which has reasons to overcome disciplinary silos, fails to counter this culture. In fact, although Christian institutions are supposed…

The world is full of recrimination nowadays. There’s the online marketplace of terror, for one thing: doxxing, death threats, so-called “cancelling,” and just plain old ad hominem bomb throwing. There is the bloodthirsty tribalism that casts one’s opponent as an existential (and almost inhuman) enemy. And there is always, in abundance, that quiet world of “bitching…

The things of the world call to us, and we are drawn to them—each of us to different things, as each is drawn to different friends.Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 105. — Parker Palmer I entered the world of academia several years ago as a complete novice. My love of…

“I will look upon death or upon a comedy with the same expression of countenance.” —Seneca, Of a Happy Life, XX Last week Todd C. Ream and Willem P. Van De Merwe reviewed and analyzed a set of J. Robert Oppenheimer biographies in conjunction with the release of Christopher Nolan’s new film, Oppenheimer. Although this…