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.…

One of the boldest decisions that I have ever made as an educator was taking twenty-four middle school students on a camping trip at the end of the school year. We had made our way through a couple of months of astronomy and what better way to conclude the project than to celebrate our learning…

Rumors of Christian higher education’s (CHE’s) demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, unlike the broader state and secular private sectors, American CHE continues to grow. The 2024 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System’s enrollment data is out, and the data provides good news for Protestant colleges. Catholic and Protestant Christian higher education enrollment, as I…

How do we train AI to recognize what is a human? In other words, what is an instance of the human? In my non-technical, lay-person’s understanding, AI makes this distinction by differentiating between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. In a semantic model, the output would be a silhouette of the whole group against the background.…

At Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, I asked undergraduate students about the role of human poets in a world where a hand-held poetry camera can take a photograph and print a little receipt-sized poem using artificial intelligence. I asked the same question again when I visited a class at Wheaton College. What is the…

I am grateful for the generous response of the authors to my review. I appreciate their clarification of the book’s overarching aim: to provide “a framework that increases the capacity of all scholars—whether biologists or poets, accountants or artists, nurses or philosophers—to recognize that faith intertwines with every aspect of their intellectual work,” and to…

We appreciate Professor Clair’s impassioned review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage. At the beginning of his piece, he nicely summarizes the book, noting its historical awareness; its sensitivity to Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal perspectives; and its analysis of America’s evolving intellectual ecosystem. Clair identifies the notion of pilgrimage as a central…

In their latest installment chronicling the relationship between religion and American higher education, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen turn to the constructive task of offering a novel and hopeful model of faith and learning suited to the present moment. Rather than remain entrenched in the enclosed ghettos of polarizing and identity-­constrained thinking, “pilgrim thinking”…

Why should Christian school leaders pursue their PhD (or EdD)? In this blog, having recently completed a PhD in Educational Studies at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, I aim to encourage others who are beginning their doctoral journey, those currently persevering in it, and those who need to be reminded that the PhD is…

When it was first published in 1998, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, not only became a bestseller but was even selected by Oprah’s Book Club. And it still holds a special place in many people’s lives all these years later. When people are asked which books have meant the most to them, they often…