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I have just finished my thirty-fifth year as an English professor at Houston Christian University (HCU), and I couldn’t be more excited and hopeful. As an increasing number of colleges and universities downplay (and downsize) their traditional liberal arts core requirements, HCU has chosen to double down on the centrality and indispensability of the core.…

The animated comments came quickly to a simple email survey. The survey was sent last fall to a handful of seasoned student development leaders of Council of Christian Colleges and Universities institutions. Their answers illuminate the realities of managing student conduct, and maybe more importantly for all of us, it provides insight into current students’…

In light of Princeton University’s recent reinstatement of proctors during final exam week due to widespread cheating involving artificial intelligence on students’ cellphones,1 I wasn’t surprised to receive the following email from one of my chemistry students: Dear Professor Rummo, I’m using a random email because I don’t want this to reflect badly on me.…

Half a million students attend institutions associated with either the Council for Christian Colleges (CCCU) or the International Association of Christian Education (IACE). Twenty percent of those half a million students are enrolled in Liberty University (LU). In addition, there are over 220 thousand students enrolled in other Protestant universities that are not associated with…

As an art historian, I often begin my courses with a discussion of metanarratives: big picture, “mythic” structures that shape values and give meaning. There are metanarratives of “progress” (like American “Manifest Destiny”) and metanarratives of cyclical return (like the medieval “four ages of man:” birth, maturity, decline, death). And for some of us, especially…

For decades, social psychologists have acknowledged that prejudice starts as early as children start perceiving the world,1 with some literature citing that children start showing a preference for their own race as early as three months old.2 More recent literature suggests that own-group preference may not be equivalent to prejudice against out-groups, as evidenced by…

Editor's Note: The following is a book excerpt from the new edited volume: From the Outrageous to the Scandalous: Re-imagining Christian Thinking and Scholarship in an Age of Tribalism and Ideological Resentment, eds. Robert H. Woods Jr. and Mark Allan Steiner. The assignment that I’ve been given is to attempt an assessment, now more than a…

In watching two recent movies—Project Hail Mary and Remarkably Bright Creatures—I’ve noticed something that might help us understand the much-talked-about “vibe shift” that’s happening in America. If you’re unfamiliar with this trend, it refers to an emerging sense that our long cultural season of irony, nihilism, and performative cynicism may be giving way to something…

Pope Leo XIV released his first papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on May 25, a roughly 42,000-word document outlining a Catholic response to recent developments in AI. I had been eagerly anticipating this encyclical and spent much of the release day poring over the text. While there have been other Christian efforts to release statements about…

Elon Musk recently made the headlines for his proposed Tesla pay package that could exceed one trillion dollars,1 setting a new high watermark in CEO compensation. It is unlikely that Musk will actually receive that amount for multiple reasons. The proposed pay scheme includes a series of financial targets, including dramatically increasing the firm’s market…

I am working on a large translation project this year. I have been surprised to find several conversation partners voicing the assumption that I am getting AI to do the translating for me. I’ve been wondering how to respond. A short, but in the end inadequate answer is that, impressive as the current variations on…

How do faculty at Christian higher education institutions navigate their careers with purpose and with joy? That is the driving question behind our new edited collection, Purpose and Joy: Pursuing a Meaningful Career in Christian Higher Education, available this month from Abilene Christian University Press and Leafwood Publishers. When we first posted the call for…

In March, I shared the good news regarding the growth of Protestant, particularly Evangelical, higher education enrollment over the past decade. In this post, I drill down deeper to discuss where this growth is occurring. What we find is that Protestant higher education institutions, in particular, are finding creative ways to grow amidst a tough…

Nicholas Jenkins’s recent book, The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, assesses English poet W. H. Auden’s artistic engagement with his country, offering a reading of Auden’s interwar period as a political project, one in which the poet would attempt to cultivate the formation of an English people from the ruins of their recent history,…

In my first posts with CSR (see here, here, and here), I explored stories of conviction, transformation, and the slow work of formation. Today’s story introduces a compass that I use to navigate learning in the age of AI, and of course, it’s about bananas, absurd deals, and the choices we make in our learning…

The other day, I got a call from a friend who’s finishing work at a dying Christian college. But she did not call to seek condolences. She called to share stories about the final weeks of this final semester. Despite tears in her voice, she sounded more joyously stunned than grieved. Students and professors should…

Here are some fake college course evaluations for Jesus courtesy of Amanda Lehr: “Kind of absent-minded. My name’s Simon, and he’s called me ‘Peter’ for the entire semester.” “A complete joke. Only got the job because his dad is important.” “Inaccessible. He told me he’d be in his office; I walked all the way there,…

This is a marvelous book teaching a core virtue: teachableness, an eagerness to learn from others. This is a perfect read at the beginning of a school year for Christian scholars/teachers who must first be learners if we hope to facilitate the learning of others. I loved this book. It used biblical theology to show…

For those who are going through some of life’s most difficult situations, what might gratitude look like? Does it even make sense to talk about gratitude? And what is helpful about such gratitude, and what might not be as helpful or even harmful? These are some of the big picture questions that my psychology colleagues…

Last spring, I exchanged emails with a former student I’ll call Anna. It had been a year since Anna had taken my composition course, and I had just sent her the “Future You” letter she had written to herself as an end-of-the-course assignment. Reading back over her letter had given Anna perspective on herself and…