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In our recent study of students’ goals, we find that almost every student implicitly understands our human pursuit of what I call Identity Excellence. They exhibit a desire to be excellent in their various sub-identities. Thus, they list goals such as “be a good friend to others,” “be a good brother,” “be a good wife,” “be…

Dorm Fridge, Check. This summer I became a first-time college mom, and I prepared like one. Dorm fridge, check. Heavy duty moving bags with straps, check. Twin XL sheets, check. I read ALL the blogs and scrolled through ALL the posts written for nervous, excited first-time college mamas like me. Somewhere in all that advice…

Most business students spend four years in a classroom before anyone lets them make real decisions with real money. They learn the four Ps, how to build a pro forma in Excel, and write a business plan for a coffee shop that will never open. Then we hand them a diploma and act surprised when…

I love to argue; my parents always told me I would become a lawyer, yet it was not the path for me. Regardless, I somehow found myself in a role as Dean of Students, which provided several opportunities for spirited discussion about what someone may, or may not have done. Despite those moments, when I…

For much of the twentieth century, certain Western sociologists embraced the same prophecy (i.e., theory) with ease and total confidence. They claimed that as science continued to advance, global economies modernized, and literacy and education spread, religion would steadily retreat into history, dismissed as a superstition from a pre-enlightened era. Religious faith, we were told…

Reading these daily postings has become a refreshing ritual for me. As someone who likes books and long essays, I have been a faithful reader of the Christian Scholars Review since its beginning in 1970. Yet, as the blog has developed, the format of short daily pieces has come to be something I cherish. Early…

Earlier this year, an article by the well-known Christian sociologist Christian Smith made the rounds. Entitled “Why I’m Done with Notre Dame,” Smith chronicled his frustration with the University of Notre Dame’s priorities and administrators' lack of effort in promoting its Catholic mission. I found his description of what happens at the University of Notre…

Our politicians have a problem. They like to spend money on things, but they don’t like to pay for those things. This is a bipartisan problem. We citizens also have a problem. We want things from the government, and we don’t want to pay for them either. We vote for representatives who are happy to go…

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,…