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A friend of mine recently shared that when talking with his daughter about her classes at a Christian university, he found himself repeatedly asking, “Did you discuss any constructive proposals?” Her consistent answer was, “No, we really did not have time.  We had to spend so much time on deconstructing structures of ____________” (with "deconstructing…

Survey Q: How does the Christian faith inform your message about alcohol?Participant: “We don’t really have a message about alcohol, aside from ‘don’t do it’.” When I worked in public policy, I once spoke at a governor’s conference in North Dakota. After my talk, I struck up a conversation with the Lt. Governor. She made…

When I teach our Natural Sciences Capstone seminar class, I must give the graduating seniors a challenging, cumulative assignment, appropriate to a 1-credit seminar course that meets once a week. In my class, these opposing requirements are met by assigning them to write a two-page proposal for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program…

In April, the actions of the Washington state legislature were discussed on the SPU faculty e-mail list, which might be a first. We celebrated as SB 5848 “Concerning licensure for music therapists” passed.Congratulations to my colleagues Carlene Brown, Christopher Hanson, Evelyn Stagnaro, Bobbie Childers, and others for their hard work to accomplish this. The bill…

Christianity is best understood as a religion that requires integration throughout a believer’s life. Scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 10:31 and James 1:8 warn against compartmentalizing one’s life into sacred areas that are subject to God’s requirements and secular areas that are outside His purview. Christian business faculty have long called on our students to…

“I will endeavor by a very simple and commonplace method to lead you by experience into the divine darkness,” wrote Nicholas of Cusa in 1453 to the monks at Tegernsee.Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God (New York: Cosimo, 2016), 2. In 2023, our faculty/staff reading group discussed Nicholas’s method in a conference room with…

I am continually amazed at how provincial and specialized contemporary graduate education is. By provincial and specialized, I mean that there is usually little interdisciplinary conversation that takes place within the curricula. Unfortunately, Christianity graduate education, which has reasons to overcome disciplinary silos, fails to counter this culture. In fact, although Christian institutions are supposed…

The world is full of recrimination nowadays. There’s the online marketplace of terror, for one thing: doxxing, death threats, so-called “cancelling,” and just plain old ad hominem bomb throwing. There is the bloodthirsty tribalism that casts one’s opponent as an existential (and almost inhuman) enemy. And there is always, in abundance, that quiet world of “bitching…

The things of the world call to us, and we are drawn to them—each of us to different things, as each is drawn to different friends.Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 105. — Parker Palmer I entered the world of academia several years ago as a complete novice. My love of…

“I will look upon death or upon a comedy with the same expression of countenance.” —Seneca, Of a Happy Life, XX Last week Todd C. Ream and Willem P. Van De Merwe reviewed and analyzed a set of J. Robert Oppenheimer biographies in conjunction with the release of Christopher Nolan’s new film, Oppenheimer. Although this…

I am grateful to the editors of Christian Scholar’s Review for their invitation to guest edit a special issue of the journal, focusing on vocation and higher education. Although vocation is an important theological concept, it has had a complicated historical sojourn; it therefore requires some unpacking. At various times and in various contexts, the…

Is a student demonstrating a skill in the lab enough to consider that student competent? Can the student then demonstrate proficiency in that skill in a clinical setting without the aid of faculty? How much reinforcement is needed to help a student obtain competency? These are just some of the typical questions that float around…

In the first essay in this series, we presented the notion that within interdisciplinary work “we each represent our own discipline, but we are all working for the same Kingdom.” This second essay in this three-part series is presented from the disciplines of education and behavior analysis. The unique gift of the education department is…

For all their economic vulnerabilities, small Christian colleges, and universities might be the ideal environment for fostering interdisciplinary research. Given that the realities of size, scale, scope, and student load can serve to restrict the kind of projects faculty at these institutions can carry out, it makes sense to recognize our strength in this niche…

As recounted in the previous post, Oppenheimer fixated on a rather limited view of the academic vocation. While limited in scope, such a view allowed him to pursue noteworthy excellence. He experienced an especially triumphant phase between the time he accepted his joint appointment at UC Berkeley and Cal Tech and the time he resigned…

Based on the review of Oppenheimer biographies we offered in the last two posts, a set of common themes begins to come to the surface. These themes bring into greater relief how Oppenheimer developed a fragmented understanding of the academic vocation, and what we can do to cultivate a healthier version of it. First, all…

The vocational fragmentation we noted in yesterday’s post summarizing some prominent Oppenheimer biographies likely had deeper roots going back to Oppenheimer’s childhood. David C. Cassidy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century offers important details concerning the impact of Oppenheimer’s upbringing on his sense of vocation. Cassidy contends that Oppenheimer’s parents considered it to be…

However, it is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.United States Atomic Energy Commission, In…