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Time for Self-Sacrificial Leadership in the Christian University World

Many universities in America are experiencing difficult times. The combination of enrollment declines and operating cost increases has pushed some universities beyond their ability to adapt. A growing number of institutions suffering financial exigency have either closed or been merged into more economically healthy university systems.Evan Castillo and Lyss Welding. 2025. “Tracking College Closures and…
August 18, 2025
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Mother Wounds

When I was a young professor, before I had children of my own, I found myself getting too emotionally entangled with my students. I don’t think I violated students’ boundaries or did anything intrusive. I was too constitutionally timid for that. But I DID take my students’ problems home with me at night, identifying with…
August 14, 2025
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Your Work Matters. And it Doesn’t. Be Glad.

I sit in an empty computer lab, surrounded by the sleek machinery of digital existence, propped in the curvature of an adjustable office chair. I have been here all day, all week, working hard, even harder than usual, spurred on by participation in a writing cooperative. There are others in neighboring rooms, secreting words onto…
August 12, 2025
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Malleability in World Language Departments: One Case Study

The study of foreign languages in the United States has experienced a significant decline over the past few decades. According to the Modern Language Association (MLA), enrollment in college-level foreign-language courses dropped 9.2 percent from 2013 to 2016.Julian Wyllie, “Enrollment in Most Foreign-Language Programs Continues to Fall,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 7, 2018.…
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Cultivating Honest and Courageous Researchers: Teaching Statistics Through a Christian Virtue Lens

In recent years, the social sciences have faced a “replication crisis,” raising questions about how we conduct, report, and interpret research findings. A large-scale replication project in 2015 tried to recreate nearly 100 studies from recent publications and found only about 40% of attempts successfully replicated. This finding sent shock waves through the psychology community.…
August 7, 2025

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What is Won and Lost in a Virtual Lab?

For ten months my laboratory has sat empty and dark. But it is never quiet. An aggressive air handling system has covered the vacant benches with humming and whirring through nearly a year of distance learning. My institution went fully online in March, like most other schools, but we continued to be primarily online throughout…
January 28, 2021
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January 6 and the Fixation of Belief

I imagine that most of us are looking through the binocular lenses of scholarly specialization and Christian faith as we seek to understand the January 6 attack on the Capitol: a day of infamy that will be a defining moment in our students’ lives, much as 9-11, the Challenger explosion, and the assassination of Martin…
January 26, 2021
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Guest Post: An Apology for Physics in the Christian Liberal Arts

Einstein once wrote: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.…
January 25, 2021
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Faith and Weapons of Math Destruction

“Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps.”Roger Forsgren, “The Architecture of Evil”, The New Atlantis, Summer 2012. With this sentence, Roger Forsgren opens his article titled “The Architecture of Evil”. Although it was Hitler and his henchmen who unleashed death and destruction during the Second World War, it required railways, factories, warehouses, and…
January 22, 2021
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Reclaiming Humor in Uncivil Times

How do we know Jesus was a woman? Answer: because, even after he was dead he had to get up and serve people. Some context may be helpful. I was the only man in a graduate seminar on feminist rhetoric.  Along with six other Ph.D. students we were part of a list serve and often…
January 21, 2021
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Guest Post: Thoughts on Academic Titles

A common approach to the Christmas season is to study the “titles” of Christ, perhaps from Isaiah 9.  Between the season and some recent discussions about the use of “titles” I’ve been reflecting on the use of titles in our culture and my life.  Obviously, current American culture is both informal and egalitarian and becoming…
January 20, 2021