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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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Why we Cannot Ignore Institutional Racism

I have been posting a lot on race lately. And that will continue for the foreseeable future. To be honest I thought I was mostly done talking on racial issues about ten years ago. At that time I had come out with a book – Transcending Racial Barriers – which basically stated what I wanted…
January 18, 2021
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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