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Wordy Professors, Woodland Elves, and the Wisdom of Tolkien

Modern (digital) life feels like drinking from a firehose. There’s so much content to triage. It was bad before the onslaught of generative AI. Now, the digital dam has burst. Our tendency to “give our two cents” about every issue—already increased by social media—has been further amplified by the AI-driven capacity for supercharged content creation.…
October 20, 2026
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Computers and the Good Life: Learning from Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry was a prolific writer, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. His recent passing encouraged me to reread some of his works and consider how they could be applied to my work in the field of computer science. If you know Berry’s work and life, you will already be aware of his refusal to…
October 19, 2026
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College Students Want Confidence: But Is It a Virtue that Can Be Taught?

Many of our students lack confidence and want more of it. For example, our research team gathered goals from almost 2,700 students nationwide from 14 institutions, for almost 6,500 goals. One clear longing they expressed was a desire for confidence, articulated in their goals such as the following:  “Improve my self-esteem/confidence.”  “Build my confidence.”  “Be…
October 16, 2026
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Frolicking in new Fields with AI

I had a question: could artificial intelligence (AI) help me visualise the textual form of my thoughts and help me re-work them in a picture. That way I could look at them again in a different light and also have a different medium through which to explain them to other people? I’m reasonably competent at…
October 15, 2026
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Freud and Suspicion

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. This year, then, is his 170th birthday year. That’s not a significant marker, but having come across that fact, I was reminded of all that I read about Freud during the 150th anniversary, in 2006, when we were given many anecdotes about his life. Here is one that stuck…
October 14, 2026

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Secular Formation in the Christian College Classroom

In the era of declining enrollments, Christian colleges and universities face two perennial questions: what are the defining features of Christian education, and why are they worth a higher tuition rate than the state school down the road? Christian colleges offer many distinctive features, including chapel, single-sex residence halls, and required courses on theology or…
May 5, 2023
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The Art of New Creation: Trajectories in Theology and the Arts (Book Review)

Encouraging signs suggest that a revival of Christian art could be gathering strength. New publications, workshops, conferences, communities, websites, and leaders are in place, working to bring a powerful infusion of spiritual energy into the Body of Christ via the many-faceted vehicles of Christian art. The Art of New Creation draws from the proceedings of…
April 27, 2023
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Do Protestant Universities Need Vice Presidents for Christian Mission? Why I Have Changed My Answer

In my research on Christian higher education, I have found that one of the most important differences between Protestant and Catholic institutions pertains to their executive leadership teams.See for example two recent publications, Perry L. Glanzer, Theodore F. Cockle, Jessica Martin, and Scott Alexander, “Getting Rid of “Church-Related” Colleges and Universities: Applying a New Operationalizing…
April 21, 2023
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You Can’t Have a Telos of NO

A telos means what something is for, the ultimate end at which it aims. The telos of an acorn is to be an oak tree. The telos of a human community is to enable the flourishing of its members, and ultimately of the whole human family. Christianity maintains that the telos of a human being…
April 19, 2023
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The Challenges of Writing about Teaching

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…
April 17, 2023