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Doctors Crossing Borders, and Other Perils of Professional Training

This fall I am teaching an Honors Seminar designed for students in my home university’s College of Health Sciences. The students are all eager to pursue their professional careers as medical doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. Sadly, only 10% of them have expressed any interest in practicing in those parts of the world where they…
November 19, 2024
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When Judgment Hurts

Last month, I attended a conference at Calvin University focused on how to counter reductionism in teaching and education. Certainly, our culture has been in thrall to reductionist tendencies for some time, as the angry, dismissive tone of internet culture and political discourse shows us. Sadly, this tone often makes its way into the classroom,…
November 18, 2024
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“Is it Wrong to Mourn What You Do Not Know?” On Satisfaction and the End of Learning

Many faculty professional development days, hallway dialogues between colleagues, and programs for the integration of faith and learning exist because of the common question: how can we motivate our students to desire learning? Although scaffolded course objectives and early alert systems for struggling students are designed with the ostensible end of effective teaching in mind,…
November 15, 2024
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An Extended Review of The Artistic Sphere: The Arts in Neo-­Calvinist Perspective (Part 2)

The words of Calvinists like Kuyper on the one hand, and secular “formalists” like Greenberg on the other, can sometimes seem interchangeable. However, Kuyper and Greenberg would certainly have disagreed concerning the “area of competence” contained in the “Artistic Sphere.” For Kuyper (and for Rookmaaker, who worked out Kuyper’s ideas through art criticism) the artist…
November 14, 2024

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Earth Has a Pulse, Scientists Say

If you follow the latest science news, whether it’s a newsfeed from Science Daily or a casual listen to Ira Flatow on Friday afternoons, you may have learned that Earth, indeed, has a pulse. As reported in the journal Geoscience Frontiers, rigorous statistical analysis for the timing of 89 major geological events of the past…
July 6, 2021
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Reading George Marsden with Gen Z

Each spring semester for the past twenty-odd years I have assigned the same essay to my junior-level history majors at the Christian college where I teach. In it historian George Marsden navigates the complex relationship between personal faith commitments and serious academic scholarship, laying out what I believe numbers among the most compelling visions for…
July 2, 2021
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Sanctuary

Professional art historians are among the luckiest of God’s children. Our vocations consist in the study and praise of beautiful things. If we are fortunate to have an academic job, we can use the summer months to travel and discover even more beauty - and count this useful, as well! So it was that I…
July 1, 2021
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Guest Post – Deconversion: The All-Or-Nothing Fallacy

It seems that not a month goes by without a well-known Christian announcing on social media that they have left the faith. More troubling, but less sensational is that for each celebrity deconversion there are hundreds of unknown believers who deconvert that don’t get the headlines. Deconversion from Christianity is a growing and troubling trend.…
June 30, 2021
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Guest Post: General Systems Theory for a Kinder, Gentler World

“Ship, Then Test” That phrase headlines a section from entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, and engineers would call these fighting words.Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything (New York: Penguin Group, 2004) Yet many businesspeople would nod in agreement with the thought.In all fairness,…
June 29, 2021
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Theo-Drama and Mise-en-Scéne

In my current book project, The Wages of Cinema: Looking through the Lens of Dorothy L. Sayers, I argue that full appreciation for the relationship between Christianity and film necessitates knowledge about the history of theater: a word that comes from the Greek “to see.” Seeing the medium, whether on stage or screen, echoes one…
June 28, 2021
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“The Reservoir From Which We Need to Drink”: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae

Forty years ago Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory unexpectedly became a touchstone text, one that scholars across disciplines read with unusual urgency.  In the midst of the postmodern turn, MacIntyre served notice that modernity’s increasingly evident deficits—cultural, political, and intellectual—might be fruitfully addressed by arguments stemming from ontologies believed by many, perhaps most, to…
June 25, 2021
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Guest Post: Jacob’s Well: Pride and Grace in Eden, Arkansas

The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps. -Proverbs 16:9 In my first CSR post, I wrote about Nomadland’s cardiac geography: protagonist Fern’s wistful spirit and her fellow van-dwellers’ radical sense of independence. Their pride manifests as constant movement—perpetual flight—which suggests that spiritual restlessness results in physical waywardness. A similar…
June 24, 2021