Skip to main content
Blog

The Creed and a Christian Worldview

Anniversaries matter. If you’re a cancer survivor, each year of remission offers a fresh lease on life. If you’re married, every annual commemoration of your wedding is an opportunity to recommit to your vows. Your work anniversary may include a bonus or raise. The anniversary of a loved one’s death summons both grief and remembrance.…
June 27, 2025
Blog

How Coaching Youth Sports Helped My Thinking about Christian Character

The most important activity that helped refine my view of character education was not taking classes on epistemology and ethics from Dallas Willard. Nor was it taking all my other Ph.D. classes that addressed virtue or moral development. It was coaching youth league sports. Granted, readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology led me to recognize…
June 25, 2025
Blog

AI and the Grammar of Descent

Recently, there’s been even more press than usual about AI proliferation and its associated risks. The hype has been driven, in part, by the now infamous Ross Douthat interview with Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, in which Kokotajlo suggests that AI could take over civilization—and “then kill all the humans”—by 2027.…
June 24, 2025

Subscribe

for new content notifications, access to video and audio conversations with our writers, and invitations to our events.

Blog

Armor, literal and figurative: On Pontius Pilate and the Artist Raphael

In 1505, the Renaissance artist Raphael Sanzio lavished his skill on a subject rather out-of-date: the legendary dragon slayer St. George, an early Christian saint generally associated with the martial and chivalric spirit of the Crusades. In his large painting of the subject at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the holy warrior…
March 15, 2021
Blog

Advising Students and Discerning Direction

The student who sat in front of me was having difficulty looking me in the eyes as he shuffled his hands. He slowly began to speak. He was a second-year engineering student having second thoughts about his chosen field of study. He knew he liked being creative, but he was becoming increasingly convinced that his…
March 11, 2021
Blog

Guest Post: Why I am Abandoning Online Test Monitoring

Dear friends, I have decided to stop using the online test monitoring system.  I had felt conflicted about it throughout the semester last fall, because I was not convinced that it would prevent cheating and suspected it could worsen equity issues. Now I am finally abandoning it because it is bad for my soul and erodes…
March 10, 2021
Blog

Enjoying the Bible?

I’m particularly thrilled to interview Matthew Mullins (Twitter: @MullinsMattR) this month, not only because his book Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures (Baker Academic 2021) is such a timely and insightful book, but also because Matt is my colleague at The College at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary where he serves as Associate…
March 9, 2021
Blog

The Last Acceptable Prejudice

There’s been an ongoing, race-to-the-bottom-like debate about what actually constitutes the “last acceptable prejudice” in mainstream culture. Among a list of contenders, I want to focus on one that has been suggested elsewhere—a bias toward rural America and rural Americans. I highlight this bias, not because I have particular empirical support for it, although much…
March 5, 2021
Blog

Counting the Saved

In the first weeks of 2021, during what were (please God) the deadliest days of the pandemic, a theoretical modeling study was published in the British medical journal, The Lancet. Behind the confidence intervals and bewildering acronyms is a testimony of God at work, bringing life and life flourishing where otherwise death and isolation would…
March 4, 2021
Blog

Extending Hospitality When We Fear

Half a century ago, my parents were expatriates in Brazil during a volatile time of that country’s history. My father was a university chaplain and my mother a nurse in the local favela. Reflecting on what has unfolded in the US over the past weeks, my mother wrote to me: “We watch with anxiety what…
March 3, 2021