For Christmas 2021, my wife got me the gift of improv comedy classes. We happen to have an improv comedy theater right here in our little Chicago suburb, and she signed me up for a Level 1 class. She says I brought up the idea at some point—I certainly don’t remember doing that—but I was…

My inventive colleague, Dr. Isaac Soon, recently offered a constructive counterpart to all the handwringing in academia about ChatGPT. Instead of bemoaning ChatGPT’s potential to mimic student papers for fear of widespread cheating, why not use ChatGPT as a teaching and research tool? Isaac put up on his weblog a process he could supervise, as…

There are, I believe, two major reasons—one external and one internal—why the number of humanities majors is sinking in colleges and universities across the country. The former has to do with economic forces outside the control of the departments of English, history, and philosophy, and even of academia itself. Job anxiety and rising costs have…

When I began reading Servant Teaching—Practices for Renewing Christian Higher Education, by Quintin Schultze, I felt like I had discovered a priceless jewel for which countless educators had searched for decades. Schultze addresses, with grace and humility, the theme of teacher dispositions. And, he does not just dance around the topic of character-based leadership, as…

In 2017, a group of about forty Christian communication scholars convened at Spring Arbor University to participate in a dialogical mini-conference on “Civility and Virtue in a Multicultural Public Sphere.” A year and a half into the presidency of Donald Trump, our conversations kept turning to the plague of incivility in our national discourse and…

“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship….” (Acts 17:22-23) Across my newsfeeds recently has come news of an “Exceptional trove of 24 ancient statues found immersed in…

I double-checked the title; was “witness” singular or plural? With the answer—singular—the book’s thesis became crystal clear. Amy-Jill Levine invites each reader to be a witness, a witness to arguably one of the most monumental events in history, the death of Jesus of Nazareth. She lays bare each ancient witness’s actions and testimony, and encourages…

Developing a solid biblical foundation on the issue of multicultural ministry is essential if we are to have any meaningful discussion on how best to respond to undocumented workers. If God desires to bring to Himself a multiethnic community that will best reflect His glory, then we should be doing everything we can until then…

To faithfully respond to a specific issue (like undocumented workers in America), we need to take a step back and see a bigger picture of God’s work as revealed in God’s Word. While the issue of undocumented workers touches on several topics (political, legal, economic, etc.), at its heart, talking about undocumented workers is about…

As my dad handed the immigration officer our passports, I watched as the agent flipped quickly through each one of them. First my dad, then my brother, then mine. But when he got to my mom’s passport, he stopped and asked how long she had been an ‘alien’ in this country. My head quickly turned…