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With the ability to captivate our hearts, awaken imaginations and paint pictures of what it means to be a good person, stories help form (and malform) character and influence behavior.For a recent and thoughtful account of how character is formed consciously and unconsciously, see James KA Smith’s Cultural Liturgies books series: Imaging the Kingdom, Desiring…

Since most faculty are trained in thoroughly secular universities and disciplines, it can take some work to figure out what difference Christian faith can have in the practice of your discipline. I have noticed that there is a particular difficulty of this kind for economists. In this blog post, I describe the background for that…

I want to tell stories that reveal deep truths. I never want to “tell stories” in the sense of making stuff up. This May, during a devotional for our Faculty Senate meeting, I told my colleagues a story that I hoped was in the former category. And it was—once my colleague helped me see through…

Wisdom often feels like a vague, shadowy concept—something we all want but do not really understand. Sometimes we equate wisdom with intelligence, but it certainly is not guaranteed by a high IQ. Sometimes we talk about wisdom as if it were a synonym for inner peace or an automatic characteristic gained from old age or…

My students rarely know what kindness really means. When they provide feedback on their classmates’ papers, for instance, they think kindness means happy faces and exclamation marks, and a “Great Job!” written at the end. And they often think people like me, who offer them substantial critiques to help make their writing better, are simply…

In yesterday’s post, I showed how the Victorian Thomas Carlyle, though a strong critic of the Industrial Revolution, defended work as a good and godly thing. In this post, I shall extend my analysis to two other Victorians who also balanced a critique of the excesses of industrialism with a celebration of our God-given call…

Our academic age celebrates the critic more than the creator. One finds this represented in our most discussed theory of the past few decades—critical theory. Contemporary academics tend to look with suspicion upon entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. This academic tendency is not unusual for this age though. Academic critics during the Industrial Revolution exhibited…

This past year I wrote about the bodily stewardship crisis on Christian campuses. In a national survey of student affairs leaders, I noted that our research team asked them to rank sixteen themes they might emphasize on their campus. Educating students about stewardship of the body finished dead last. The second most neglected topic was…

Ten years ago, on June 5th, Aaron Ybarra went hunting. A 27-year-old with a history of mental illness, Ybarra decided to target Seattle Pacific University, a convenient setting a few miles south of the suburban home where he lived with his parents. On a beautiful Thursday afternoon during the last week of the quarter, as…

In October 2023, twenty-five theological ethicists, business ethicists, economists, and philosophers gathered in New Orleans to explore the importance of virtue in business ethics for Christians. The symposium was hosted by Loyola’s Center for Ethics and Economic Justice and funded by generous support from the Kern Foundation and Seattle Pacific University’s Center for Faithful Business.…

Sometime in your life, you have been a scapegoat. At some point in your life, you have been at the bottom of a pecking order, or at least very near to it, and you have felt ashamed and afraid. It’s likely that this experience morally compromised you. Maybe you lied to protect yourself. Maybe you…

Developing a theologically-informed vision of excellence about any topic, such as Christian higher education, requires not only serious theological and empirical study but also two other important things: 1. Studying the topic’s history; 2. Making international comparisons. Regarding the latter, one of the wonderful things about doing international research in Christian higher education is that…

I can still recall my nervousness as I taught my first classes at a Christian college. I was well-educated in electrical engineering at a large secular university, which is to say I was not well-educated in anything else. I had spent many years being catechized to think like an engineer, but faith remained largely peripheral…

When I was a boy growing up in Hong Kong, both my parents were professors. They worked some long days during the long semesters and sometimes brought papers home to grade on the kitchen table after dinner. At the same time, they never seemed to be working deep into the night, and summers were a…

It was February in Chicago, so I told my students it’s time to learn about… our local plants… Wait… What?  Why are we learning about plants in the middle of winter in the Midwest?  That’s probably what my students were thinking this “spring” semester as we entered into a unit on plants and plant diversity.…

“I don’t understand why Christians have to be so intolerant of others.” I had just finished a moderated discussion on religious pluralism with an articulate professor from another university who argued that all religions and forms of spirituality are equally valid options in today’s diverse world. I agreed that different religions and spiritual practices could…