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…

I was driving north from Edmonton to a Canadian farm family on the 54th parallel. Soon, I would be stopping for tea with them. As I approached Neerlandia, the name of their community, I was startled by a Timber Wolf crossing the road in front of me. A few minutes later, I was even more…

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…