In 1863, five years before his death at age 86, the French painter J-A-D Ingres completed a small, jewel-like canvas he titled The Golden Age. It is a gentle, luxuriant fantasy, this little picture. Blue mountains rise in the distance, and the air seems hung with gilded mist. The afternoon light burnishes green trees to…

The book of Genesis opens with the creation account describing a beautiful world of sea, earth, sky, plants, fish, birds and other animals. And then God places a human in the garden. Immediately following this part of the story is a curious verse, which at first seems out of place. The verse is Genesis 2:12,…

These years are rough, no doubt, with both students and faculty altering daily life in order to survive the pandemic—and grieving those who didn’t. While many challenges are novel, and hopefully temporary, one is perennial: the student excuse. Faculty may see student excuses as annoying time-drains that divert from the real work of education and…

This essay was published in 2012 in the book Practically Human: College Professors Speak from the Heart of Humanities Education edited by Gary Schmidt & Matthew Walhout (Grand Rapids: Calvin College Press, 2012, 133-145). It asks why we invest time and resources in learning other languages and seeks to look further than pragmatic motivations based…

Any professor using a popular professional ethics textbook in their class is likely secularizing the moral thinking of their students. To help you understand why that is the case, I want to outline briefly the history and reemergence of professional ethics and then sketch the nature of most common professional ethics texts. A Brief History…

Editor’s note: Prof. Bock’s post is part of series of posts (see here and here) related to the publication of Power Women: Stories of Motherhood, Faith, and the Academy (IVP Academic 2021) that we’re posting this week and in the following weeks.  Few areas have been as contentious for the church as the expanding role…

Editor’s Note: The following blog post is provided by Professor Tom McLeish from his 2021 Boyle Lectures.  The full version of his lecture was recently published in Zygon together with a response by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, an article by Fraser Watts summarizing the panel discussion, and a second article by Professor McLeish…

It’s almost three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. I’m trying to finish up a bit of writing while constantly keeping an eye on the top right-hand corner of my computer screen. Three o’clock is right when my daughter’s school day ends. Readers of Power Women might very well recognize these words. They are taken almost…

Growing up in a small New England town, I had a friend whose mother, a professor who taught at a private, religious college in the Berkshires, abruptly began dying her hair ash-brown when she was applying for tenure. I was bewildered and asked my friend, why? I thought gray hair was a sign of wisdom—a…