Blog

Remember all of that negative press about Christian Higher Education (CHE) declining? (see my posts on this topic here, here, and here). The just-released IPEDs Fall 2023 enrollment numbers should hopefully put a rest to that story for at least a year. The good news is that even though higher education as a whole faces…

Editor’s Note: After reading a couple of our posts about the stewardship of the body problem in Christian higher education (see here and here), Brad Bloom who publishes the Faith and Fitness Magazine, thought our audience might be interested in reading about how they are thinking about the subject for the popular fitness audience. Yesterday and today's posts are reproduced…

Editor's Note: After reading a couple of our posts about the stewardship of the body problem in Christian higher education (see here and here), Brad Bloom, who publishes the Faith & Fitness Magazine, thought our audience might be interested in reading about how they are encouraging the popular fitness audience to think Christianly about the subject.…

I have a complicated relationship with seasonal Christmas shops. I’ll bet a lot of us do. It began in the 1990s. Like most adolescents, I developed a contrarian streak when it came to the elders’ sacred cows. December rituals around Christmas Tree Shops (or their copycats) were no exception. I had a lot of reasons…

While doing some interviews among leaders and faculty at a Catholic institution this past year, I heard the phrase, “Charity is clarity” used among administrators. I loved the phrase since I think it accurately captures how ambiguity in Christian teaching, scholarship, and administration is often a failure to love. I think the phrase can also…

One of the oddest and most interesting educational developments during the past few decades is Protestants’ embrace of classical education at both the K-12 and higher education levels. What makes it odd is that certain Protestant Reformers thought key elements of classical education were suspect. After all, they attributed the too-friendly embrace of some of…

I ended last year with some reflections on how to end a semester. Here I offer some reflections on how to begin one. They were provoked by a chance encounter with an introductory Spanish grammar text. It begins with these two sentences:“Grammar is one of the most difficult (read: boring!) parts of learning a language.…

Starting around the year 1400, a new kind of Nativity Scene began to grace European art – and Italian Renaissance art, particularly. Before, Nativity scenes often featured Mary holding a swaddled baby Jesus and surrounded by animals and worshippers in a stable. The new formula, however, showed the baby Jesus lying naked on the ground,…

Imagine a single snowflake—albeit a giant one that encompasses 196,880+ dimensions. That’s the word-picture used by Mark Ronan to describe “the monster,” an extraordinarily large, complex numerical entity discovered by mathematicians in their hunt for mathematical symmetries, and one that may shed light on the deep structure of the cosmos itself.Mark Ronan, Symmetry and the…

Contra to Spencer’s demand for orthodoxy, Creation Care Discipleship commits a chapter to “Ecumenical Insights,” drawing on wisdom from representative socially conscious Christian lineages. Providing a brief overview of denominational contributions, Chapter 4 leads with the visions of Pope Francis, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I, and Lutheran ethicist Paul Santmire. Bouma-­Prediger carefully selects generally applicable…

In the past year or so, six graduates of Baylor University’s English graduate program have published books about the arts of reading well and the value of forming Christian imaginations. Jessica Hooten Wilson (grad of 2009) published Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Jessica has also published several…

Recently I re-watched The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man, played by Jim Carey, who discovers that his life has been broadcast to the world as a reality TV show. Though produced a quarter of a century ago, the movie’s critique of an “always-on,” surveillant media culture felt timely and spoke to my…

A friend asked me not so long ago, “Where can we find hope in such uncertain times?” Many of us have been asking this reasonable and pressing question for much of the past five years. As Christians, we can easily recite a couple of the 140 Bible verses that, in various different stories and admonitions,…

Every once in a while, I come across an article or book that exemplifies the best of what Christ-animated scholarship can and should be. I recently came across one such article in the field of psychology that addressed the topic of human worth. The concepts of self-worth and self-esteem have a long history in the…

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Col. 3:17 This past year a group of us published an empirical finding that will not be surprising to Christians. We found that students who indicated higher levels of certain virtues…

I appreciate Father Halík’s response to my review of his book. Let me reiterate that it’s an impressive work replete with valuable insights and many nuggets of wisdom and sanity. Despite the criticisms that I offered, his and my analysis of contemporary Christianity/Catholicism overlap considerably. In wondering whether forces extrinsic to the church have caused…

I thank Professor Howard for his attention to my book. I am seriously considering his objections. My book was written during a time of a COVID-­19 pandemic and other global threats and a great division in the world, and the Catholic Church. Many of those threats seem even more serious now, three years later. I…