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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…

After a good conversation on genetics with a dear colleague, I started pondering the following question: Isn’t it interesting how one’s training and worldview make such a vast difference in an approach to a topic? One thought led to another, and this is where I landed…  Even though the idea about differing worldviews can be applied to almost every topic in our world and our lives, I want to zero in on human genetics. That is, to consider the long sections of DNA that…

I offer you a close reading of a single line of text that startled me as I was perusing a seventeenth-century educational treatise. I am sitting at a writing retreat, drafting a research paper. Those who know me would be unsurprised to learn that the PDF open on my screen contains a work by John…

Becoming the Pastor’s Wife gets interesting immediately, with its subtitle: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry. When was ordination ever a common path for women? Hasn’t “pastor’s wife” always been the Christian ideal? Beth Allison Barr, professor of history at Baylor University, delves into the intrigue evoked by the book’s cover…

Part 2 – A Technological Partnership in the Academy The modern university has taken responsibility (we might call it a dominion mandate) for instructing generations in critical thought, writing, communication, and skill training, confirming the proficiencies of the students under our care. Our work has focused largely on certification, and AI practically eliminates that priority.…

Part 1 – A Theology of Work Few problems in recent memory have beset the Academy more swiftly than the infiltrating onslaught of bots infecting student learning. To be sure, cheating and plagiarism have always been problems threatening to undermine the educational enterprise. But in the last few years, as we are all aware, LLMs…

I am glad that Professor Tomlin appreciated my review of his outstanding book. We are both Pascalians, I wager, so our disagreements are not major. The sticking point is found in how we treat Pascal’s understanding of reason in apologetics, particularly regarding arguments for God’s existence. A few points will suffice: First, given Pascal’s several…

I am very grateful to Professor Douglas Groothuis for his generous and insightful review of my recent biography of Blaise Pascal. It is good to encounter a fellow scholar who has also found Pascal endlessly fascinating and instructive, and I am honoured to know that, with his long study and close knowledge of Pascal’s works,…

The French polymath, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), has rightly been called a masterful writer who shaped French prose, a brilliant mathematician, a pathbreaking experimental scientist, an inventor, a witty polemicist (The Provincial Letters), an apt and original Christian apologist (Pensées), and an acute philosopher, both in the disciplines of philosophy of science and philosophy of religion.Blaise…

The integration of faith in the classroom extends beyond lesson plans and syllabi. True integration begins not with course materials, but with the posture of your heart. As Christians, we are called to live according to the Fruit of the Spirit outlined in Galatians 5. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”…

During my sabbatical in the winter quarter of 2025, I had the opportunity to begin a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program through the Spiritual Care Department at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington. In our first week of orientation, our CPE supervisor offered a definition of spiritual care that has stayed with me more than…

Common Themes and Tensions All three books reviewed in the previous two posts present common themes, such as the need for missional alignment of faculty and administration and the reality of challenges in the current higher education landscape. Langer and Rae directly state “that mission fidelity is everyone’s business,” especially in hiring, and outline ways…

The Fearless Christian University In this book, John Hawthorne is advocating for a fearless Christian university, which he defines as “an institution that understands its role in the higher education landscape, can articulate that position in meaningful ways, organize its people and programs in support of that mission, and become a laboratory for how people…

When I first became a provost at a small Christian college about ten years ago, I encountered the reality that forty percent of our faculty were within five years of retirement or already well beyond retirement age. Most of these faculty were long tenured members with a significant amount of institutional knowledge, strong academic leadership…

A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon cleaning out. I’m a fairly compulsive cleaner-outer, not overly sentimental, and very much in favor of order. This particular cleaning out was hard on me, though. I knew it would be going into it, but I was surprised by the direction my thoughts took and the strength…

Culture is one of those overused words that requires a clear definition to be helpful. Personally, I find one of the most useful definitions comes from H. Richard Niebuhr’s book, Christ and Culture. Every Christian should read Niebuhr’s famous work to help them develop Christian critical thinking about how Christ can and should animate one’s…

One of the odd things about those claiming that major portions of Christian and secular higher education are basically the same is that such a claim reveals an inability to understand complexity. They fail to recognize that key differences go all the way down to the way scholars use basic words. In fact, approaching scholarship…

Today, I want to discuss a second skill that I think should be a major component of advanced forms of Christ-Animated learning, yet I also rarely see it employed. For example, in the five years of editing this blog, I can only recall a few posts on this topic. Every Christian student at a Christian…