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An Appeal to Embrace Purposeful Mentorship

Writing in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Hans Sanders tells the story of Cris Hassold of New College Florida.Hank Sanders, “A Professor’s Final Gift to Her Students: Her Life Savings,” New York Times, May 11, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/us/cris-hassold-professor-new-college-will.html. A story that in so many ways captures the best of what the university can provide…
July 25, 2025
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That sense of nagging fear

That sense of nagging fear  There is a nagging fear I experience sometimes. I’m tempted to attribute it to something earthly and circumstantial - some specific, mundane event or condition that, once solved, will make the fear go away. But I know better now. This fear is repetitive and familiar. Finally, I begin to recognize…
July 21, 2025
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Review of Sarah Irving-­Stonebraker, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age

In Priests of History, Sarah Irving-­Stonebraker diagnoses a partial cause of the identity crisis currently plaguing Western culture, generally, and the Western Church, particularly. We do not know ourselves because we have neglected the past. We are “ahistorical,” a term used by Irving-­Stonebraker to describe the loss of “meaningful engagement with, and connection to, history”…
July 17, 2025

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The Betrayal of Certitude

A Christian liberal arts education should undermine certitude: something I learned from Dorothy L. Sayers, whose twelve radio plays about Jesus were so cherished by C. S. Lewis that he read them every year until he died. In my new book, Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers (Broadleaf 2020), I recount how…
April 12, 2021
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Forging a Christian College Core Curriculum

Having worked at three different Christian colleges in my career, I have observed that discussions surrounding the core curriculum at Christian colleges can be cantankerous. Colleagues from other Christian universities have confirmed with me that core curriculum debates can set colleagues at odds. In fact, one professor I spoke with (at an institution that shall…
April 9, 2021
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Christian Politics for a Post-Christian Society

Last year I wrote about the possibility that Christians face religious discrimination in the United States. We are moving into a post-Christian society and this is reflected in increased expressions of anti-Christian bigotry. My research has confirmed that those with this bigotry are more likely to be white, male, wealthy, and well-educated. So, it is very well connected and…
April 8, 2021
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Attention and Love

In the midst of the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic, while trying to figure out how to give a genuine laboratory experience to students scattered around the world, I accidently developed a project that taught my students how to love. I was teaching a standard first semester biology course for science majors and pre-med…
April 7, 2021
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The Identity We Don’t Celebrate: Being an Excellent Enemy

And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses even stronger opposition in me. It is: “Love thine enemies.”                                                                                     Sigmund FreudSigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents Trans. and Ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961), 57. “…while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the…
April 6, 2021
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Communities of Practice: Scientists in Congregations

“What do congregations have to teach scientists?” This was the question that James K. A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, asked at a Scientists in Congregations, Scotland, conference in St Andrews some time ago. The theme of the conference was ‘Christ and Creation’, and the aim was to draw the conversation on science…
April 5, 2021
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Forsaken: On Good Friday

On this day, we remember the unjust murder of an innocent man. And he wasn’t innocent in just a legal way, or even a “religious commandment” sort of way. He was innocent in a child way, an infant way.  Though a grown man, with a man’s strength and a great scholar’s mind (of course he…
April 2, 2021
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Guest Post: Nomadland’s Cardiac Geography

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland debuted last month in select theaters and on Hulu. On Sunday it won Best Motion Picture Drama at the Golden Globes, and Zhao took home the prize for Best Director. The film stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a widow who moves from job to job, lives out of her white utility van,…
March 31, 2021
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Delighted to be a Dilettante

About a decade ago, a first-generation freshman came into my office for her first academic advising meeting. As we talked through her set of classes, I asked her in what she thought she would like to major. With downcast eyes and quiet voice, she told me that she had no idea. In that instant, I…
March 30, 2021