Until reading Professor Hiebert's blog post, I was not aware of any "war on empathy," which apparently is just the latest in a long line of heinous offenses by today's “political, religious, racial, cishet, conservative coalition.” Goodness. Perry Glanzer wrote a lucid response pointing out that empathy, while an important capacity, is not a virtue,…

How do we place our discipline and our teaching within the Christian narrative? What does it mean, as an academic professor, to submit my subject material to the Word of God as Glanzer suggests? Having already discussed an academic meta-theory and how to redeem it in a Christian context, I want to look more concretely…

I love thinking about the big picture. So it was with a great deal of excitement and hope that I read Glanzer’s post earlier this year on “Christ-Animated Analysis of Academic Theories. In the hubbub of day-to-day teaching it’s easy to focus on the individual notes we have to play and miss the direction of…

In the second part of this blog post, Paul Kim continues to share insights from his colleagues Katie Douglass (practical theologian) and Brittany Tausen (social psychologist) about their co-authored book, Love Your Neighbor: How Psychology Can Enliven Faith and Transform Community. PK: In a recent Christian Scholar’s Review article, you have written compellingly and thoughtfully…

In this two-part blog post, I (Paul Kim) am excited to feature insights from my colleagues Katie Douglass (practical theologian) and Brittany Tausen (social psychologist) about their co-authored book, Love Your Neighbor: How Psychology Can Enliven Faith and Transform Community. This book explores how to love others better through the lens of both psychology and…

“Should my teaching be any different at a Christian college…?”Arlin Migliazzo, “Introduction: An Odyssey of the Mind and Spirit,” Teaching as an Act of Faith: Theory and Practice in Church-Related Higher Education, Fordham University Press, 2003. xix. Most readers of The Christian Scholar’s Review Blog will undoubtedly affirm that yes, in our role as Christian…

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…

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…

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…

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…