(The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, Church Beautiful: Sacred Art and Spiritual Healing, available now from Cascade.) Finding What’s Missing We live in a broken culture. Levels of distrust and anger are high. Among young people, especially, clinical depression and anxiety are woefully common. Patterns of self-isolation – the deliberate “checking…

I’ll begin with a concession: by the standards that tend to govern education today, widespread employment of generative AI tools seems a marvelous idea. As colleges respond to the “enrollment cliff” by embracing market values and selling commodified diplomas to prospective student-consumers, a promise of the ability to leverage generative AI tools to synergize human-bot…

The word “deconstruction” usually carries a negative connotation for many Christians. Yet, we still need to keep and employ both the term and the activity it signifies. After all, when scholars talk about deconstructing, they refer to dismantling assumed ways of thinking that are false, unjust, based primarily upon power acquisition, or, to use a Christian…

I was blessed to earn my doctorate at a Christian university, and have served for almost two decades in higher education--and most of that journey has been with Christian schools. I must add that my initial work in HEd was with the state school near my home community, and I still have fond memories of…

The end of April marks the close of the 2025-2026 academic year and CSR’s first “Month of Giving” campaign. As the publisher, I am grateful for the generosity of an anonymous party who provided CSR with a $10,000 matching donation. I am also grateful to all individuals who responded with gifts toward helping us meet…

"Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ." Galatians 6:2-3 is the foundation I use to introduce my research to students related to empathy. To me, the verse exemplifies empathy. Empathy is often defined as the ability to understand another’s emotions and experiences. What is often missing from this affective…