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Our Problems with Sin

The animated comments came quickly to a simple email survey. The survey was sent last fall to a handful of seasoned student development leaders of Council of Christian Colleges and Universities institutions. Their answers illuminate the realities of managing student conduct, and maybe more importantly for all of us, it provides insight into current students’…
June 16, 2026
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Don’t Let the Cheaters, the Slackers, and the Cutters Steal Your Joy

In light of Princeton University’s recent reinstatement of proctors during final exam week due to widespread cheating involving artificial intelligence on students’ cellphones,1 I wasn’t surprised to receive the following email from one of my chemistry students: Dear Professor Rummo, I’m using a random email because I don’t want this to reflect badly on me.…
June 15, 2026
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Looking for Christ in Grand Canyon and Liberty University’s Online Degrees

Half a million students attend institutions associated with either the Council for Christian Colleges (CCCU) or the International Association of Christian Education (IACE). Twenty percent of those half a million students are enrolled in Liberty University (LU). In addition, there are over 220 thousand students enrolled in other Protestant universities that are not associated with…
June 12, 2026
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Finding Ourselves

As an art historian, I often begin my courses with a discussion of metanarratives: big picture, “mythic” structures that shape values and give meaning. There are metanarratives of “progress” (like American “Manifest Destiny”) and metanarratives of cyclical return (like the medieval “four ages of man:” birth, maturity, decline, death). And for some of us, especially…
June 11, 2026
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Seeing the Image of God in Everyone: Reducing Prejudice Through Imago Dei

For decades, social psychologists have acknowledged that prejudice starts as early as children start perceiving the world,1 with some literature citing that children start showing a preference for their own race as early as three months old.2 More recent literature suggests that own-group preference may not be equivalent to prejudice against out-groups, as evidenced by…
June 10, 2026
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The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: Then and Now

Editor's Note: The following is a book excerpt from the new edited volume: From the Outrageous to the Scandalous: Re-imagining Christian Thinking and Scholarship in an Age of Tribalism and Ideological Resentment, eds. Robert H. Woods Jr. and Mark Allan Steiner. The assignment that I’ve been given is to attempt an assessment, now more than a…
June 9, 2026

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Blog

The Word that Doesn’t Wear Out

In my work as a pre-med advisor, I help students navigate the pictures and words medical schools use to recruit students. Each school has a website and promotional materials making their case that they’re a good fit for YOU, the reader. One paradox of the Internet Age though is that the more information is available,…
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Avoiding the Academic Tendency to Generalize about Virtue: Why Virtue Education and Practice Must Be Specific, Part 2

As Friday’s post mentioned, virtue education is not effectively accomplished in a liberal arts classroom education. It requires what the foremost expert on excellence, Anders Ericsson, called deliberate practice. One of the keys Ericsson found to deliberate practice in a particular endeavor is to improve one’s mental representations. He defines a mental representations as “a…
May 23, 2022
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Mansions of Glory: Urban Space and the City of God

Do buildings push your buttons? How does it feel to walk down a city street and feel gleaming glass rising on either side? What about towers of stone, casting long, dark shadows? How does it feel to see spires of commerce (think New York’s Chrysler building) rising like space-age cathedrals against a vast, blue sky?…
May 19, 2022
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Cloud of Witnesses: Unexpected Models

My father was a university chaplain in a nation under military rule.  I was a child during this time and had no idea what he, my mother, and others experienced.  Years later, we spoke about these years. He recalled that on that university campus it was common knowledge that most classrooms and spaces had someone…
May 18, 2022
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Guest Post – Reading and the Virtue of Memory

It belongs to the examined life to strive for excellence in the discipline of memory. The honest and diligent activity of remembering helps us in several ways. It can be action-guiding or forward-looking. Through remembering a past experience, we are able to make a prudent call about what to do here and now—not repeating a…
May 17, 2022
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Guest Post – Die to the World and Bear Fruit

Editor’s Note: In honor of our graduating students, we are posting a devotional reflection from a Baylor graduate student, Casey Spinks, offered during a retreat for a special program we sponsor to help graduate students think about faith and learning.  At the end of his life, the philosopher Eric Voegelin asked for two New Testament…
May 12, 2022
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Guest Post – What’s That Smell?

2 Corinthians 2:14-16 ESV But thanks be to God, who in Christ Jesus, always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from…
May 11, 2022
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Restless Devices: an interview with Felicia Wu Song

Restless Devices by Felicia Wu Song, Professor of Sociology at Westmont College, is a book published in 2021 by IVP Academic. The purpose of the book is clearly stated in the subtitle: “recovering personhood, presence, and place in the digital age.” While engineers build our digital tools, I am grateful for wise social scientists like…
May 10, 2022