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FIRST: I’ll tell you what I’d like to see in my classroom: genuine Socratic dialogue. SECOND: You’ve been reading too much Classical Education hype. What makes you think that’s the answer? FIRST: Formally, it just works. You’ve got to admit that Plato is so much more engaging than most philosophers, mostly because he wrote dialogues!…

We do this thing at LeTourneau as we interview people for faculty positions – “Tell us about your faith journey.” Some call it giving your testimony. Many candidates branch off along two main paths: (1) I've always been Christian, since I was a small child - I can't remember anything else; or (2) they relate…

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,sustaining all things by his powerful word. – Hebrews 1:3 Organic chemistry reveals a world of remarkable order. Whether one examines the molecular handedness of amino acids and sugars or the predictable mechanisms governing substitution, elimination, and addition reactions, the natural…

Editor’s Note: The following is the second part of Agnes Howard’s review essay of Erin Maglaque, Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, and Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, Look Like a Lady: Five Visual Tropes of Womanhood and How to See Ourselves Differently. In Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt’s Look Like a Lady, Weichbrodt does not puzzle over…

Book Review of Erin Maglaque, Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body. Astra House (2026), 320 pp., and Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, Look Like a Lady: Five Visual Tropes of Womanhood and How to See Ourselves Differently. Brazos Press (2026), 256 pp. Virginia Woolf named a paradox about women in the past. On the one…

Modern (digital) life feels like drinking from a firehose. There’s so much content to triage. It was bad before the onslaught of generative AI. Now, the digital dam has burst. Our tendency to “give our two cents” about every issue—already increased by social media—has been further amplified by the AI-driven capacity for supercharged content creation.…

Wendell Berry was a prolific writer, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. His recent passing encouraged me to reread some of his works and consider how they could be applied to my work in the field of computer science. If you know Berry’s work and life, you will already be aware of his refusal to…

Many of our students lack confidence and want more of it. For example, our research team gathered goals from almost 2,700 students nationwide from 14 institutions, for almost 6,500 goals. One clear longing they expressed was a desire for confidence, articulated in their goals such as the following:  “Improve my self-esteem/confidence.”  “Build my confidence.”  “Be…

I had a question: could artificial intelligence (AI) help me visualise the textual form of my thoughts and help me re-work them in a picture. That way I could look at them again in a different light and also have a different medium through which to explain them to other people? I’m reasonably competent at…

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. This year, then, is his 170th birthday year. That’s not a significant marker, but having come across that fact, I was reminded of all that I read about Freud during the 150th anniversary, in 2006, when we were given many anecdotes about his life. Here is one that stuck…

Completing a dissertation involves getting into the weeds. As a bipolar disorder and quality-of-life researcher, I’ve found the swamp is quite vast. In recent years, quality of life has become an important outcome in chronic illness research (Flanagan et al. 2017). This is true in qualitative research, which explores how people experience illness, and in…

The title of this reflection on God’s handiwork comes from an assertion made by the beloved London preacher of the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It is from his commentary on Psalm 111—the Psalm of God’s Works, published in his seven-volume magnum opus, The Treasury of David. In the commentary, he continues the title’s assertion,…

It is a fundamental human urge to answer the questions: Who am I? Why do I matter? What is my life for? And because we are humans bearing the image of God, we have an indelible instinct that these questions of identity, value, and purpose have positive answers and that these answers have something to…

The adage still holds true: “You are what you eat.” French author and gastronome Jean Brillat-Savarin astutely commented, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”  Although his comment was focused on the things we physically consume to fuel our bodies, it also rings true of the things in our…

A variety of large language models, commonly called “artificial intelligence” (AI), have seen increasing popularity and widespread adoption in recent years. In fact, the popularity of chatbots like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT has caused many to think that AI is synonymous with chatbots. However, AI comprises far more than chatbots, encompassing a variety of machine…

“For with whatever standard you judge, you will be judged, and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you.” - Matt 7:2  Matthew 7:2 has always fascinated me. It seems to sit at the juncture of some sticky Christian problems: Can you call out sin without judging? If we forego all judgment,…

My eighty-seven-year-old mother recently found out that the non-smoker’s lung cancer she had treated thirteen years ago is now back. My mother, a godly woman, told me that since this diagnosis, she has had even sweeter communion with the Lord. That’s not because she has learned to be more positive in an earthly sense. Physically…

Are college students awake to the kind of person institutions are forming them into? Or are they similar to the cow in David Shrigley’s cartoon that looks at the milkman and asks, “What the hell are you doing?” (49). In the same way, are faculty members awake to the education they are providing their students?…

One of the first things I learned when I started graduate school was how to be a hockey coach. Actually, this happened several weeks before I registered for any courses at the University of Alberta. We arrived in Edmonton—four hundred miles north of the Montana border—well before the first academic term began. We had no…

From our nation’s beginnings, Americans have feared the death of religion. The Puritans had not even arrived in the New World before they started predicting what would happen should they prove faithless to the Lord. In his “Model of Christian Charity” address, given to English Puritans departing for New England in 1630, Massachusetts Bay Company…