Skip to main content
Blog

The Brazen Serpent: Healing Through Sacred Art

(The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, Church Beautiful: Sacred Art and Spiritual Healing, available now from Cascade.) Finding What’s Missing We live in a broken culture. Levels of distrust and anger are high. Among young people, especially, clinical depression and anxiety are woefully common. Patterns of self-isolation – the deliberate “checking…
May 6, 2026
Blog

Generative AI, Market Values, and the Christian College

I’ll begin with a concession: by the standards that tend to govern education today, widespread employment of generative AI tools seems a marvelous idea. As colleges respond to the “enrollment cliff” by embracing market values and selling commodified diplomas to prospective student-consumers, a promise of the ability to leverage generative AI tools to synergize human-bot…
May 5, 2026

Subscribe

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

Blog

Hearing, Speaking, Learning.

Some years ago, I was sitting in my campus office minding my own business when the phone rang. It turned out to be Matt, a student who had been in a sequence of required core German courses that I had taught a few years earlier. He seemed breathless with excitement. It quickly emerged that he…
August 9, 2021
Blog

Guest Post – Holocausts I’ve Never Heard Of

This article initially appeared in Current. I was on a train heading from Alexandria to Cairo. Next to me sat my friend Grace, a fellow student in the American master’s program we were just finishing. She was a Kenyan who had a radiant smile and a prominent accent that sent her English dancing and curling…
August 6, 2021
Blog

Learning to Love the Unlovable: Being Schooled by Students

Our students are often our best teachers. Their actions often expose the ungodly perspectives and habits that have accumulated on us like barnacles on a ship. I encountered two stories while coding interviews from Baylor students that reminded me that I have some barnacles from difficult experiences about loving the unlovable.   If I had been…
August 5, 2021
Blog

Who was Herman Bavinck? An Interview with James Eglinton

Herman Bavinck was a late 19th and early 20th century theologian whose work has been attracting renewed attention by Christian scholars. A 2020 book published by Baker Academic about his life titled Bavinck: A Critical Biography, was written by James Eglinton, the Meldrum Senior Lecturer in Reformed Theology at the University of Edinburgh. What follows…
August 4, 2021
Blog

Returning to Campus, In Person

As many of us return to physical campuses this fall, mostly without masks, we are following the advice of classic sociologists: humans need proximity. It’s worth the trouble to regain this aspect of pre-pandemic life. As for me, I anticipate seeing students again with joy, but being on campus also brings the strong possibility of…
August 3, 2021
Blog

Home

Editor's Note: Due to an early morning link problem with the e-mail sent Thursday, we are resending Katie Kressar's post Friday, July 23rd as well.  In addition, the Christ Animating Learning Blog will take a one week vacation next week. We will return on August 2nd.  Thanks, PLG Like many academics, I’m a small-town kid…
July 22, 2021
Blog

How Southern Honor Corrupted American Higher Education: A Christian Critical History and Alternative to Honor Codes

Universities, including Christian ones, have become quite comfortable with what some might describe as the “virtue” of honor. Although we may instinctively classify it as a favorable trait, honor—as it exists on college campuses today—has a troubled backstory. What is more, today’s faculty and administrators who esteem honor may not know about its contentious history.…
Blog

Grieving the (Possible) Loss:

What I Love about South Korea Study Abroad, and Why It Might Not Be the Same Again My home state of Washington just declared a “full re-opening” and a return to a (new) normal. As a result, I can see relief on the faces of those around me as we Washingtonians attempt to remember what…
July 20, 2021
Blog

Guest Post: A Well-Read Life

I have designed my ethics class to interweave ethical reflection (theory) with formation (practice), in part by thematically pairing readings with spiritual exercises. One such pairing includes Aquinas’s account of the virtue of love (Summa theologiae II-II q. 25-27) and a week of repeated contemplation of the apostle Paul’s hymn of love in I Corinthians…
July 19, 2021
Blog

Teaching as a Call to Becoming

In teaching Biblical studies, I have come to view the integration of faith and learning less as a movement from doing to becoming and more as a process from being to becoming. It is less a movement from something to another, and more a maturation process, the transformation of one’s identity, brought about through the…