This piece is a slightly adapted version of a recent editorial written for the International Journal of Christianity and Education. In the preface to his recent book Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching,Mark D. Jordan, Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Mark Jordan (2021) recalls his experiences as a young teacher who “found many…

A few years ago my oldest son took a required sociology course at Baylor for a general education class that introduced him to sociological theory. He found it uninteresting and irrelevant to his life. Indeed, surveys discover most students find general education uninteresting and irrelevant to their lives (for a review of the research see…

In yesterday's post, I maintained that our talents are, just like our very lives, gifts from God. Recognizing that our lives and talents are gifts has three important implications for athletes: gifts must be cultivated, gifts are temporary, and gifts must be used well. These facts—regarding the nature and purpose of athletic gifts—are not often…

In my last post, I focused on the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno. There I attempted to draw lessons out of Dante’s text regarding the place of courage in sport. Here, I want to extend the examination to the second book of the Divine Comedy, the Purgatory. In this post, I will…

In the Seattle Art Museum, there is a little painting that often perplexes my students. It shows a scrawny, aged, half-nude man kneeling on desert ground and facing a small crucifix mounted on a stick. His left arm is extended with its empty hand splayed; his right hand holds a gray, prism-shaped rock. And despite…

Earlier today as I was scrolling through my phone’s camera roll, I paused at pictures of March 2021. My son and daughter, five and six then, were masked at the grocery store in the canned vegetables section. The next picture was them a few months later, masked at the playground. As I scrolled through the…

During the pandemic, many of our relationships with others, known or unknown, found a new low as we were, for a time, unable to be with them and have our shattered perceptions of them re-calibrated. So here is the challenge of the modern post-pandemic world, especially for the Christian: our social discourse feels intractably conflictual.…

Relationships, even with people we like, permanently and precariously live on the precipice of disintegration. They are only possible in the context of love, which in turn can only be sustained in the context of another relationship – with the triune God. The reason for this tendency towards disintegration that is recovered through love lies…