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Awe’s Power to Diminish Us (and That’s a Good Thing)

While Colorado is known for having 50 mountains that exceed 14,000 feet, my home state of Washington boasts its own mountainous claims, with nearly 100 reaching mile-high peaks. Yet one among them stands out. At 14,409 feet and 60 miles southeast of Seattle, Mt. Rainier is simply known as “the mountain.” In a city that…
February 12, 2025
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An Excellent Conversation

Some months ago, I rode to the airport with Uber, as I have done many times before and since. I noticed before the car arrived that the driver had high ratings for “excellent conversation.” Sure enough, it was not long before he started raising topics for discussion. He was driving for Uber on his day…
February 11, 2025
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Ordering Our Loves and Understanding Our Limits

Our two boys were three and six years old when my wife contracted Guillain Barré. Fortunately, the doctors were able to stop its deadly progression caused by her immune system going crazy and demyelinating her nerves before it reached her vital organs. She spent the next year in bed on a roller coaster of "recovery"…
February 7, 2025
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Do as I Say…and as I Do

“…you are shockingly fit.” These are the words from a young man who happened to be in the weight room at the same time I was in the fall semester of 2021. Of course, this was a semester in which COVID containment measures were plentiful. Student times were separated from faculty and staff times in…
February 6, 2025

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The Liturgy of Lament for Second-Act Leaders

As an Industrial / Organizational Psychologist, I have spent almost 30 years studying leaders. Not so much leadership theories but leaders themselves. How do they think about being a leader? What motivates them? How do they make sense about being in this role, and how much of their identity is wrapped up in being a…
October 2, 2020
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The Market Made Me Do It: Revising the Scandal

This essay appeared first at Mere Orthodoxy:  https://mereorthodoxy.com/market-made-scandal-evangelical-college/ Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind turned twenty-five last year. If we know a classic by its ability to speak across eras, one single event from this past summer is enough to assure everyone of the continuing tragic relevance of Noll’s book. In late July,…
September 30, 2020
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A Little Narcissism Inside

In her summer release, President Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, describes her uncle as a “narcissist” with a complex and pathological relationship with his deceased father. Her diagnostic sequitur, though hardly original, carries the sting of coming from a family connection. In another story closer to home, a longtime Taylor University philosophy…
September 28, 2020
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Celebrating Christian Creators

I recently reviewed John Bernbaum’s fantastic new book, Opening the Red Door The Inside Story of Russia's First Christian Liberal Arts University for The Review of Faith and International Affairs. After reading the book, I came to the conclusion that John Bernbaum should be celebrated as one of the great Christian creators. The book documents two decades of John’s work…
September 25, 2020
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Crisis, Community, and Lament: Living During Chaotic Times

The day I am writing this post is September 11. In 2001, I was still a rookie administrator living with 200 freshmen on a Christian college campus in Southern California. The horror of that morning rippled into shock, confusion, and perplexity as the day continued. The community gathered together with care, empathy, and resolve. As stories permeated through…
September 23, 2020
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What A Tale of Two Cities Can Tell Us About Injustice in America Today

“Those who cannot remember the past,’ the philosopher George Santayana, famously said, ”are condemned to repeat it.” Literature is one way of “remembering” the past in a way that exceeds the limits of our own memory and experience. If there were one work of literature that might help us today to avoid repeating a violent and painful past…
September 21, 2020
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Language Learning as Spiritual Medicine for a Culture of Narcissism

Today’s post is an excerpt of a longer talk given by David Lyle Jeffrey in May 2019 at a conference sponsored by the Christian Association for World Languages (CAWL). We are thankful for the opportunity to share Dr. Jeffrey’s wisdom for the benefit of Christian scholars of all disciplines. His commitment to the importance and power…
September 18, 2020
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The Poetry and Music of Science

In this blog, I write about the story of a new book, The Poetry and Music of Science. This account of the role of creativity and imagination in science, very under-emphasised in education and public discussion of science today, was motivated by my earlier search for a ‘theology of science’ articulated in the earlier (2014) book Faith and…
September 16, 2020
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Toward a Christian Film Aesthetic

As co-director of the Marion E. Wade Center, the world’s most comprehensive archive of books and autographs by and about C. S. Lewis and six of his most important influencers, I have delighted in reading unpublished correspondence and manuscripts by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), whose radio plays about Jesus nurtured Lewis’s spiritual life. Among the many…
September 14, 2020
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What does Christianity have to do with Economics? Three Approaches

Since most faculty are trained in thoroughly secular universities and disciplines, it can take some work to figure out what difference Christian faith can have in the practice of your discipline. I have noticed that there is a particular difficulty of this kind for economists. In this blog post, I describe the background for that…
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September 11, 2020