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Editor's Note: Due to a technical issue with WordPress, this essay was published earlier this month without the text, only the tables. We have reposted the corrected version today.  Human culture and consciousness in the Global North have evolved profoundly over the past two millennia, and are conventionally referenced as the overlapping respective eras of…

Jesus tells us that it is more blessed to give than to receive. With Thanksgiving approaching, I thought this an opportunity to reflect on giving, receiving, and what it means to be thankful. The popular conception of Thanksgiving is that it’s a time to give thanks for the blessings in our lives—for our family, friends,…

Many years ago, my wife, Phyllis, and I were the guests of the University of Notre Dame provost at a football game in South Bend, Indiana, between the Fighting Irish and West Point. At halftime, someone pointed me toward the private box where the leaders of the two schools were watching the game together. I…

About 10 years after I became the president of Fuller Seminary, I received a letter from a college student asking me for career advice. His goal in life, he said, was to be the kind of academic president that I was, and he wondered how he should prepare for that role. I wrote back, telling…

Many colleges and universities, within the CCCU and without, continue to be faced with difficult questions regarding which academic programs to retain and which to “consolidate.” There are an incredible number of factors that inform each of these considerations, and I do not covet those who are tasked with the corresponding decisions. It is often…

Should there be a distinctively Christian approach to engineering? If so, is it possible? After all, Christians and non-Christians seem to agree on all the technical details in engineering, like integration, derivation, Fourier transforms, and finite element analysis. So why do we take a distinctly Christian approach to engineering? The first and foremost reason that…

Dear Non-Believing Colleagues: My open letter is divided into two parts. The first one opens with a parable of sorts. An atheist professor once approached a colleague with a sensitive question. The latter was a religiously devout academic from a distant foreign country who appeared to hold traditional views. “In your view,” she asked, “is…

The following excerpt from Nadya Williams, Christians Reading Classics, is published with permission from Zondervan Academic. *** Sometime in the mid-fourth century BC, a young man, Ariston, was walking home one evening from the shrine of Persephone in Athens. Suddenly, a middle-aged man named Konon along with his son and a couple of other associates…

In my class on disabilities, I recently experienced one of those sacred moments when I could see how Christ animates learning—not through curriculum or lesson structure, but through the hearts of students. From the very first day, I sensed something different about this group. Their responses, their willingness to listen, and their genuine care for…

One intriguing question that has puzzled scholars in the study of history has been: why did science as we know it today develop in the West and not the East? After all, one could argue that Asian cultures had empirical interests and cultural humility that could have fostered a similar sort of study. In the…

Over the past twenty years, the needs of university students have changed significantly. As Jonathan Haidt adeptly chronicles in his Anxious Generation, mental health and loneliness, depression, and anxiety are rampant among today’s youth. COVID only exacerbated this. Recognizing these challenges, two Whitworth professors from disparate disciplines set out to craft a course to address…

It’s common to observe that digital technology has undermined the assumption that institutions are trustworthy. Some people lament it, and others celebrate it, but everybody sees it. Thanks to the Internet, institutions have lost much of their authority to shape common knowledge. This certainly includes institutions of higher education, Christian and otherwise. It’s less common…

In the present university world, we talk a lot about impact. Our research is measured by its impact on our academic discipline, according to how often it is cited and by whom. Woe to the professor whose research always winds up in journals with a low JIF. The leading accreditor in the field of business,…

Hunter’s overall point is well taken, though: new efforts at undergirding democracy became more focused on reason (internally derived ideas) or on natural law (externally derived absolutes), and less so an amalgamation of the two, feeding eventually into a culture war. For instance, John Dewey had great faith in our capacity to reason our way…

Hunter’s overall point is well taken, though: new efforts at undergirding democracy became more focused on reason (internally derived ideas) or on natural law (externally derived absolutes), and less so an amalgamation of the two, feeding eventually into a culture war. For instance, John Dewey had great faith in our capacity to reason our way…

James Davison Hunter wants us to know things look bad because they are bad and have been so for quite some time: the United States is not only facing stark polarizations in our time, but, he argues, these polarizations are a result of the longstanding fault lines within our foundations for democracy. In this long-awaited…

Editor's note: Images Courtesy of St. Michael's College School “Why speak of muscular Christianity?” asked an academic to a presenting colleague at a sports history conference I recently attended. The questioner made it clear that, in his opinion, sport historians have no need for religion in their field of study. The statement sounded sensible, as…

I am late for class. More precisely, I arrive in the classroom too close to the start time for my liking. I frantically go through the pre-class ritual: log into the podium computer, open my PowerPoint file, lay out lecture notes, grab a few whiteboard markers, find the attendance sheet, and take a big sip…

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and other streaming services can provide an insightful international education if you want one. With movies and television shows from any country with enough money to trot them out, one can get a good idea about what appeals to the popular passions of numerous different cultures. As an American viewer, what…