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As Dennis Hiebert’s post recounted yesterday, Christians have been arguing about empathy. Usually, I find myself, as a Christian moral educator, disagreeing with most parties in this conversation, whether they hail from the theological/political right or left. In this essay, I propose an alternative approach to thinking about empathy that differs from the books and…

Given the military setting of all four verses of their national anthem, Americans have unsurprisingly employed the same rhetoric to declare a “war on poverty” (Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964), a “war on drugs” (Richard Nixon, 1971), a “war on terror” (George W. Bush, 2001), and an ongoing “war on crime.” Nevertheless, commencement by some Americans…

An old word for “good work” is vocation, and another way to say this is to say that our fundamental responsibility, as colleges and universities, is to inspire our students to seek, and help them to discern, their vocations. The NetVUE project has done a lot to revive and expand the concept of vocation beyond…

Students usually come to our institutions with one of three aims in mind: to get a job, to change the world, or to “grow as a person,” as they like to put it. Unsurprisingly, these three aims correspond to the three aims that define contemporary higher ed: to train workers for the economy, to drive…

I was driving north from Edmonton to a Canadian farm family on the 54th parallel. Soon, I would be stopping for tea with them. As I approached Neerlandia, the name of their community, I was startled by a Timber Wolf crossing the road in front of me. A few minutes later, I was even more…

During my graduate studies in philosophy, and later, when I began my teaching career, one of my areas of focus was social-political thought. I concentrated in part on the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato and Aristotle. I dug into the detailed writings of the “social contract” thinkers of the modern period: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, especially.…

One of the boldest decisions that I have ever made as an educator was taking twenty-four middle school students on a camping trip at the end of the school year. We had made our way through a couple of months of astronomy and what better way to conclude the project than to celebrate our learning…

Rumors of Christian higher education’s (CHE’s) demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, unlike the broader state and secular private sectors, American CHE continues to grow. The 2024 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System’s enrollment data is out, and the data provides good news for Protestant colleges. Catholic and Protestant Christian higher education enrollment, as I…

How do we train AI to recognize what is a human? In other words, what is an instance of the human? In my non-technical, lay-person’s understanding, AI makes this distinction by differentiating between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. In a semantic model, the output would be a silhouette of the whole group against the background.…

At Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, I asked undergraduate students about the role of human poets in a world where a hand-held poetry camera can take a photograph and print a little receipt-sized poem using artificial intelligence. I asked the same question again when I visited a class at Wheaton College. What is the…

I am grateful for the generous response of the authors to my review. I appreciate their clarification of the book’s overarching aim: to provide “a framework that increases the capacity of all scholars—whether biologists or poets, accountants or artists, nurses or philosophers—to recognize that faith intertwines with every aspect of their intellectual work,” and to…

We appreciate Professor Clair’s impassioned review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage. At the beginning of his piece, he nicely summarizes the book, noting its historical awareness; its sensitivity to Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal perspectives; and its analysis of America’s evolving intellectual ecosystem. Clair identifies the notion of pilgrimage as a central…

In their latest installment chronicling the relationship between religion and American higher education, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen turn to the constructive task of offering a novel and hopeful model of faith and learning suited to the present moment. Rather than remain entrenched in the enclosed ghettos of polarizing and identity-­constrained thinking, “pilgrim thinking”…

Why should Christian school leaders pursue their PhD (or EdD)? In this blog, having recently completed a PhD in Educational Studies at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, I aim to encourage others who are beginning their doctoral journey, those currently persevering in it, and those who need to be reminded that the PhD is…

When it was first published in 1998, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, not only became a bestseller but was even selected by Oprah’s Book Club. And it still holds a special place in many people’s lives all these years later. When people are asked which books have meant the most to them, they often…

I sometimes wonder what I want to achieve with my students. When I started teaching in 2000, at the mature age of 23, I primarily taught for the pleasure of teaching. I also did it to help students acquire the knowledge required by the course and subsequent courses. At that time, I taught C++ programming,…

My wife and I recently returned from a visit to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. George Vanderbilt, grandson of the famed shipping and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, envisioned and constructed his family’s palatial Southern Appalachian home in the late nineteenthcentury. Inspired by the Châteauesque architectural style of France and England, the 250-room Biltmore…

In 1840, the composer Robert Schumann wrote a lieder (art song) for his soon-to-be wife, Clara (herself an accomplished musician). He took his lyrics from the poet and linguist Friedrich Rückert. The result was a piece called Widmung (“Dedication”), considered to be one of the most lush and profound love songs ever written. It went…

I did not learn how to read until I was in college. Granted, I knew how to read various forms of fiction, history, my Bible, and devotional books, among others. But those were different types of reading. What I did not know how to read was a book that made an argument. It is a…

Mark Driscoll. Tony Evans. Bill Hybels. Ron Luce. Robert Morris. Ravi Zacharias. And now Phillip Yancey. These names once evoked respect, if not reverence, from the people who read their words, listened to their sermons, and gave to their ministries. Today, they stir grief, confusion, and debate. For many Christians, these public collapses have become…