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The Empathy Wars: A Further Christian Analysis

As Dennis Hiebert’s post recounted yesterday, Christians have been arguing about empathy. Usually, I find myself, as a Christian moral educator, disagreeing with most parties in this conversation, whether they hail from the theological/political right or left. In this essay, I propose an alternative approach to thinking about empathy that differs from the books and…
March 12, 2026
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The Outbreak of War on Empathy

Given the military setting of all four verses of their national anthem, Americans have unsurprisingly employed the same rhetoric to declare a “war on poverty” (Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964), a “war on drugs” (Richard Nixon, 1971), a “war on terror” (George W. Bush, 2001), and an ongoing “war on crime.” Nevertheless, commencement by some Americans…
March 11, 2026
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Vocation and the Purposes of the University (Part II)

An old word for “good work” is vocation, and another way to say this is to say that our fundamental responsibility, as colleges and universities, is to inspire our students to seek, and help them to discern, their vocations. The NetVUE project has done a lot to revive and expand the concept of vocation beyond…
March 10, 2026
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Reconciling the University’s Purposes (Part I)

Students usually come to our institutions with one of three aims in mind: to get a job, to change the world, or to “grow as a person,” as they like to put it. Unsurprisingly, these three aims correspond to the three aims that define contemporary higher ed: to train workers for the economy, to drive…
March 9, 2026
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The Wolves of Neerlandia

I was driving north from Edmonton to a Canadian farm family on the 54th parallel. Soon, I would be stopping for tea with them. As I approached Neerlandia, the name of their community, I was startled by a Timber Wolf crossing the road in front of me. A few minutes later, I was even more…
March 6, 2026
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Machiavelli and Christian Leadership

During my graduate studies in philosophy, and later, when I began my teaching career, one of my areas of focus was social-political thought. I concentrated in part on the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato and Aristotle. I dug into the detailed writings of the “social contract” thinkers of the modern period: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, especially.…
Richard Mouw
March 5, 2026

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Christian Education for Librarianship, Part 2: The Current State

In my previous post, I offered the following line of reasoning: (1) The field of librarianship is inherently value-laden and thus subject to examination from a biblical worldview. (2) Few Christian institutions offer a graduate program in library science. (3) Libraries that serve Christian institutions offer the most natural venue for integrating faith and librarianship.…
April 5, 2022
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Christian Education for Librarianship, Part 1: A Rationale

My interest in relating Christian faith to the practice of librarianship emerged about 25 years ago when I was pursuing my master’s degree in library science. I first explored such integration in a class paper that I entitled “The Role of Christian Academic Libraries: Promoting the Theistic Worldview.”A revised version of my paper was published…
April 4, 2022
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What Nursing Students Can Teach Us About Life

“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.” (1 Timothy 4:12 – NIV) In my January 20, 20221 Christ Animated Learning Blog post, I wrote about several ways I offer my students opportunities to…
April 1, 2022
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Don’t Look Up as a Neil Postman Parable

The recently released Netflix movie Don’t Look Up is a satirical film featuring a star-studded cast of actors. The film tells a gripping story about a comet heading for earth as a metaphor for climate change, but it also provides a profound commentary on American politics, entertainment, and social media. Leonardo DiCaprio plays an astronomer…
March 31, 2022
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Advice to Christian Professors of Business

Feelings of tremendous pride well up when I hear about alums who are ascending career ladders on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, or at locally based tech companies like Amazon. Then, I start to wonder if some of these grads are moving up because they are just good at helping their employers “make money,” but…
March 29, 2022
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Gabriel’s Hello

Author’s Note: By the kind permission of both journals’ editors, a version of this piece with the title “Gabriel’s Word to Woman” is also being published today by Church Life Journal. I am especially grateful for this gesture of Christian solidarity on the Feast of the Annunciation, 2022, the day on which Pope Francis is…
March 25, 2022
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Loving Faces: Community in and after the Time of Pandemic

In the time of pandemic… …we have lived in a mix of virtual and in-person worlds.  As we shift back into a more in-person world, I want to remind myself and others of the importance of community and relationships. Why do we need community? The bigger question might be, why do we need relationships?  The…
March 24, 2022
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Disfiguring the Figure of the Sojourner-Immigrant

As educators, we know the importance of taking advantage of “teachable moments,” those valuable, yet often unexpected, instances in which student interest and eagerness conspire to create a context in which learning a particular idea becomes most accessible or possible. Although I know I have seized some such moments in my classrooms, several have undoubtedly…
BlogReviews

Book Review: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

The oft-used analogy that “fish don’t know they’re in water” is a reminder that a worldview, or, in Charles Taylor’s more nuanced phrase, a social imaginary (26), often becomes so taken for granted that we do not notice it anymore. Carl Trueman’s latest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, reveals the water…
March 22, 2022