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Of Prophets, Priests, and Professors -Part 2

In our previous post, we compared the role of Christian professors with that of the Old Testament prophets as “stewards of truth.” Following the model of the prophets of the Old Testament, we are required to maintain the truth of our respective disciplines, deliver it convincingly in the classroom, and continuously refine it to apply…
July 14, 2026
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Of Prophets, Priests, and Professors -Part 1

Serving as a Christian university professor is not the most celebrated job in America. It is not an ignoble profession, but few of us would describe ourselves as overpaid. Most of us are exempt from federal minimum wage and overtime laws. One would think the years of education required to serve as a professor would…
July 13, 2026
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Flourishing 4.0: God’s Shalom and the Wholeness of Human Flourishing

One of the most ambitious attempts to answer the question of human flourishing appears in Tyler VanderWeele’s A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing. An epidemiologist whose work has helped shape contemporary research on flourishing, VanderWeele engages many of the themes explored by earlier writers—meaning in the face of suffering, justice within community, and…
July 10, 2026
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Flourishing 3.0: The Empirical Turn

What if the attributes of flourishing could be identified, defined, and studied as a social phenomenon, allowing those insights to inform interventions designed to improve well-­being and happiness? What if science itself could be harnessed to advance human flourishing? Many social scientists pursued enthusiastic answers to these questions. The chief architect of what would become…
July 9, 2026
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Flourishing 2.0: The Justice of Shalom

In the immediate post-­war period, the writers representing Flourishing 1.0 primarily examined the crises of flourishing within the interior life—questions of meaning, selfhood, and the courage required to live amid despair. Yet they were also attentive to the broader cultural forces that produced such crises. Tillich, for example, warned that political systems such as Communism…
July 8, 2026
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Four Cultural Movements in the Search for Meaning, Justice, Happiness, and Well-­being: Flourishing 1.0–Staying Human in the Absence of Meaning

What does it mean to flourish? The Israelites in Babylon likely did not imagine that they would prosper in exile. Yet through the prophet Jeremiah, they were instructed to build houses, plant gardens, and seek the good of the city in which they lived, even knowing that the exile would outlast most of them. Flourishing,…
July 7, 2026

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Hourglass: For the New Year

As we celebrate the New Year, we commemorate the passage of the old. In the mass media, this comes in the form of top ten lists and “in memoriam” montages. In folk imagery, it is symbolized by Father Time with his sickle. (He even appears in Rudolph’s Shiny New Year.) Though often comical in recent…
January 18, 2022
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Lessons from the Pandemic: Situating Human Flourishing

Devastating as the pandemic has been, it has created space for reflection on important questions. Much of what we considered “normal” before no longer seems viable. As some argue, wealth, social and racial inequality, oppressive work conditions, among other issues not only remain, but have become exacerbated as a result of the on-going pandemic. A…
January 14, 2022
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“Friending” the Dead (Part 2): Friendship with the Living

Author’s note: In yesterday’s post, I argued that one of the purposes of scholarship is friendship with the dead. Today, I reflect on how our relationship with the dead can both enrich and be enriched by friendship with the living. . . . We sometimes think of scholarship as something occurring in a vacuum. The…
January 13, 2022
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“Friending” the Dead (Part 1)

Author’s note: This two-part post is based on a talk first delivered to Baylor University’s Crane Scholars (2010), a cohort of Christian undergraduates considering careers in academia, and then to undergraduates in Baylor’s Honors Residential College (2015). . . . About the weird title—I had better confess right now that I am not a Facebook…
January 12, 2022
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Review of Public Intellectuals and the Common Good: Christian Thinking for Human Flourishing

“America needs more private intellectuals.”Francis Joseph Beckwith, Twitter post, June 22, 2021, 10:36 a.m., https://twitter.com/fbeckwith/status/1407346836223021065. Emphasis added. So tweeted Baylor University philosopher and occasional public intellectual Francis Beckwith. Perhaps Beckwith had in mind a particular public intellectual’s unfortunate essay or social media misadventure. There is little doubt public intellectuals draw fire from all sides. Scholars…
January 11, 2022
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Gender and Character Education: The Case of Self-Control

Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control.Prov. 25:28 (NIV) That self-control is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:23) required of both men and women is not debated in Christian circles (see also 2 Peter 1:6). Titus 2 specifically emphasizes the need to teach self-control to older men (v.…
January 10, 2022
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Learning Embodied Wisdom from Majority World Women

“Now, every day as soon as I wake up, I am instantly aware that I am female.  I never used to think about this.”  - From a student completing a six-month internship in India Learning to navigate involves a whole lot of relating and locating: relating a map to the actual landscape we are traversing,…
January 7, 2022
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Guest Post – The Work of (Y)our Hands

This post is dedicated to my mother, Deborah Elizabeth Mitchell (née Vestal), whose faith, hope, and love will always sustain me. Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. –Isaiah 64:8 Growing up, my mom, née Vestal, would sometimes remind me…
January 6, 2022
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Interview with a Recent College Grad: Rebecca Olsen

Interview with a Recent College Grad: Rebecca Olsen A lot has changed in the world and for college students since I went to college long ago. Even over the course of three decades of teaching college students, I’ve observed that students today attend college for different reasons, face different obstacles in working toward their degrees,…
January 5, 2022