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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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Guest Post: Is Servant Leadership Christian?

It is now 50 years since Robert Greenleaf coined the term “Servant Leadership” in his groundbreaking essay, The Servant as a Leader.Robert Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader(Newton Center, MA: The Robert K. Greenleaf Center, 1970). In a break from command and control strategies of the past, Greenleaf’s leadership theory required that a leader must be a servant first…
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Humility in Science

What qualities does it take to be a great scientist? You might think of intellect, great experimental technique, original thinking, and endless hard work. Humility may not be the first thing that springs to mind. Nevertheless, humility is a very helpful virtue in science, and I think it has played an important role part in…
January 13, 2021
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Calling in a Post-Pandemic Economy: Rethinking What we Teach about Life After Graduation

In a matter of months, our graduating seniors will be looking to land in the places where their “deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”This often used definition of calling comes from Frederick Buechner’s Wishful Thinking: A Seekers ABC (San Francisco: Harper-One, 1993), 118-9. If economists are right, however, the post Covid-19 job market will likely resemble the…
January 11, 2021
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Reflections on How to Begin a Semester

I ended last year with some reflections on how to end a semester. Here I offer some reflections on how to begin one. They were provoked by a chance encounter with an introductory Spanish grammar text. It begins with these two sentences:“Grammar is one of the most difficult (read: boring!) parts of learning a language.…
January 8, 2021
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Our Blog Team’s Top Faith-Learning Books of 2020

At the end of a busy and tiring semester, I asked blog contributors if they had a favorite faith-learning book of the year.  I received suggestions from a variety of blog authors and disciplines. A book by a professor from Rice University (go owls), Elaine Howard Ecklund, received Ruth Bancewicz and Clay Carlson’s votes for…
January 7, 2021
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Full of Our Diminished Selves

In a recent New York Times column, Ross Douthat explored “the reasons behind a seemingly unreasonable belief” (namely, the belief that the presidential election was stolen). Some points that Douthat raises in his essay about this “post-truth” age have implications for our task in helping our students to research well, with soundness of materials as…
January 6, 2021
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Christian Scholarly Creativity: A New Year’s Assessment and Call

For the first post of the New Year on the Christ Animating Learning Blog, I think it is important to assess how far we have come with regard to Christianity and higher learning. We should certainly rejoice in the fact that, by God’s grace, Christians have created hundreds of Christian educational institutions around the world.…
January 4, 2021
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Luxuriant (at Christmastime)

In gray Seattle, it’s easy to feel a sense of mystery as you walk the streets. The clouds hide the sun, and the wind rushes (sometimes), as if hiding secret voices. The mystery is only greater now, as people walk silent and masked, faces veiled, paths parallel and never approaching. Each one is a rook,…
December 21, 2020
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A Christian Appraisal of Academic Titles

I have been thinking about academic titles this past semester (as is evident from my blog post at the beginning of the academic year and my Ph.D. student’s post yesterday about his experience of my experiment).  How fitting, then that the semester should end with the twitter-stirring controversy sparked by an op-ed about the academic…
December 17, 2020