I offer you a close reading of a single line of text that startled me as I was perusing a seventeenth-century educational treatise. I am sitting at a writing retreat, drafting a research paper. Those who know me would be unsurprised to learn that the PDF open on my screen contains a work by John…

Becoming the Pastor’s Wife gets interesting immediately, with its subtitle: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry. When was ordination ever a common path for women? Hasn’t “pastor’s wife” always been the Christian ideal? Beth Allison Barr, professor of history at Baylor University, delves into the intrigue evoked by the book’s cover…

Part 2 – A Technological Partnership in the Academy The modern university has taken responsibility (we might call it a dominion mandate) for instructing generations in critical thought, writing, communication, and skill training, confirming the proficiencies of the students under our care. Our work has focused largely on certification, and AI practically eliminates that priority.…

Part 1 – A Theology of Work Few problems in recent memory have beset the Academy more swiftly than the infiltrating onslaught of bots infecting student learning. To be sure, cheating and plagiarism have always been problems threatening to undermine the educational enterprise. But in the last few years, as we are all aware, LLMs…

I am glad that Professor Tomlin appreciated my review of his outstanding book. We are both Pascalians, I wager, so our disagreements are not major. The sticking point is found in how we treat Pascal’s understanding of reason in apologetics, particularly regarding arguments for God’s existence. A few points will suffice: First, given Pascal’s several…

I am very grateful to Professor Douglas Groothuis for his generous and insightful review of my recent biography of Blaise Pascal. It is good to encounter a fellow scholar who has also found Pascal endlessly fascinating and instructive, and I am honoured to know that, with his long study and close knowledge of Pascal’s works,…