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Teaching About Racial Colorblindness: Some Strategies, Struggles, and Confessions

As someone who teaches about the psychological pitfalls of racial colorblindness, it’s been jolting to see this ideology being touted as an ideal way of relating to one another. For example, President Trump has repeatedly used this term, including during his inauguration speech. Recently, against the backdrop of the current public sentiments about racial colorblindness,…
March 10, 2025
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Rethinking the Promotion of Adaptation in the University

Like most college professors in this Year of our Lord 2025, I sometimes think about what I would do if my position got the axe. I never come up with any good ideas, and my institution is relatively healthy, so I usually just let it go and get on with my work. Tomorrow will take…
March 7, 2025
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Creating and Redeeming Institutions: A Christian Approach

“All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.” Rousseau, Emile, Book 1 In the last decade, politicians, academics, and activists have called for abolishing various institutions (e.g., “abolish the police,” “abolish USAID”). These calls emerge out of the declining trust in almost every institution, which is at a historic low for particular institutions…
March 6, 2025
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How The Age of AI Makes Christian Colleges More Valuable

“I can learn anything from AI now – why spend four years at a Christian college?” A high school senior asked me this question recently, his phone displaying ChatGPT’s impressive analysis of his calculus homework. It’s a question that echoes in living rooms across the country as families weigh the value of higher education against…
March 5, 2025
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Strength in Christ’s Body

Praising Athletic Excellence In the early 20th century, physical culturist Bernarr Macfadden wrote a paean to praise the glory of humanity. His hymn of the gym—titled “Manhood Glorified”—was to be hailed, he said, “with majesty”: The world resounds, demanding human glory The cry for health prevails throughout the land While grovling through life’s mire Seeth…
March 4, 2025
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Peter Dougherty’s responses to the posts on “In Praise of Lunch”

First I would like to thank Todd Ream for his kind invitation to participate in the online discussion of my Inside Higher Ed article, “In Praise of Lunch,” appearing in Christian Scholars Review, and its editor-in-chief,  Perry Glanzer. Secondly, I’m deeply grateful to Tim Muehlhoff, Christopher Gehrz, and Jenell Paris, the three scholars who so…
February 28, 2025

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Defamiliarizing Christianity

“Christ Animated Learning” is an inspired title for this blog, for Christ the Logos (“word, thought, rationality”) is always the one who animates (from Latin anima, “spirit, breath of life”) the journey toward Truth that we call “learning.”  The same Spirit who effected my conversion to Classics as a college sophomore, immersing me in the…
February 11, 2021
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Bodies, Beauty and Time: On Michelangelo

Contemporary culture is obsessed with the human body. It (that is, the body) carries so much responsibility. Weak, mortal, finite, it is made to bear burdens of eternity: it is made to be a sign of dignity, meaning and status that is somehow eternal. So, we punish it, whipping it into shape with brutal exercises.…
February 10, 2021
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Identity Excellence and Not Identity Politics Should Be Our End

Although I am a college professor, I must confess that my most important education during college did not come from professors. As an undergraduate majoring in history, political science, and religion at Rice University, I had some great classes with outstanding professors—one even won a Professor of the Year award among faculty for the entire…
February 9, 2021
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Changing Faces on Freedom of Religion or Belief

A mere four years – something of a lifetime – ago, the Berkley Center asked many scholars and activists to offer advice for the new administration of President Trump. At the time, I argued that the new administration needed to leverage its multilateral assets: that freedom of religion or belief needed American leadership, but that…
February 8, 2021
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“Just the Answer, Please”

Deep into the throes of last semester—at that juncture when I invariably lose the pedagogical forest for the trees—I noticed a reoccurring discussion across each of my classes. While my courses focus uniquely on topics such as analyzing social welfare policies, child welfare practices, and grant writing—one pressing and underlying question kept emerging. That is,…
February 5, 2021
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The Rationality of Irrationality

Back in 1996, my husband and I had a heated debate over the former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s use of the term “irrational exuberance” to explain the bull stock market at that time. He agreed with Greenspan that irrationality was the only explanation for some of the ridiculously inflated price to earnings ratios,…
February 3, 2021