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I have spent the majority of my training and professional career in large public universities. In fact, from kindergarten through PhD and the first thirteen years of my academic career were in public institutions.  So I received little training on faith integration and Christ-animated learning during those periods.  However, when I arrived at Samford University…

This blog post explores the intersection of faith and business education by incorporating "spiritual assignments" within the framework of a modern business school curriculum. I aim to share the possible connection between these two realms and shed light on educators' invaluable assistance in fostering students’ comprehension of this connection. In this post I will prompt…

How does a Christian university change a culture and overcome fear, differences of opinions, and a faculty body comprised of diverse Christian traditions? How does the university guard against implementing an administratively-driven, plug-and-play approach to faith and learning integration that would infringe on the faculty member’s academic freedom? The starting point for us at Samford…

What is—what should be—the Christian’s role in politics? There is no easy answer to this question. The present agitation among evangelicals in this election year recalls a debate extending back centuries. In the 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church and the kings of Europe were locked in a contentious alliance—each side trying to maneuver into a…

If I were forced to select a single passage from C. S. Lewis’s hefty corpus that sums up most fully his genius for uniting reason and imagination, for exposing the fault lines in the monolith of modernism, and for expressing profound insights in the simplest of terms, I would choose one that occurs in Chapter…

One of the exercises that I often have both classroom students and survey respondents do is to prioritize their identities. I first ask them to consider the range of identities they might apply to themselves, and then I ask them to rank their top three. I find the answers produce significant clarity about my audience,…

I think human beings are built to want to impress someone. To please someone. To get approval. It’s there, palpably, in everyone’s eyes, if you know how to look. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this - nothing at all. It’s built into the tripartite structure of the Trinity, wherein Father and Son gaze upon each…

Part-way through teaching a new course on faith and pedagogy last year I noticed an emerging pattern that had not been a fully conscious part of my plan. An unanticipated trend slowly turned into a conscious strategy that threaded its way through several major topics. It started a few weeks into the semester as we…

Part guidance to young lawyers and law students and part Christian apologetic for the legal profession, Robert F. Cochran, Jr.’s new book, The Servant Lawyer, is a much-needed addition to the dialogue between the church, the legal profession, and the communities they both serve. The overall tone of the text is prescriptive. Cochran argues that…

Throughout our scholarly careers, we have consistently been struck by an empirical finding we often encounter. The most important religious variable predictor in studies is usually not how people identify (e.g., Christian) or what they believe (e.g., certain views of the Bible). Instead, it is simply a weekly action. How often do they go to…

For my own part, I know I must keep alive in myself what I have once known and grown into. —Thomas MertonThomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, Image, 1968), 187.  My wide-ranging but low-built apartment complex, constructed before I was born, values its old maples and oaks, though time has reduced…

Why does the Bible exist? Whereas many introductory textbooks explore the “Four W’s” of inquiry (who, what, when, and where), Jacob L. Wright seeks to answer why a tiny nation over the course of several centuries produced a prolific and enduring corpus of texts. Setting aside answers one might expect from a confessional setting (“because…

When we receive a manuscript that looks promising for publication, I often ask its authors to keep two things in mind as they work on revisions. First, I ask them to make it clear why people should care about their topic, reminding them that most of their readers will likely be outside their field. However,…

In How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (2023), David Brooks calls us to re-think how much true influence we can have on others if we do not take the time to genuinely know them and hear their perspectives. In a time of distrust and uncertainty across…

In 2018, a group of us at Baylor helped start the Baylor Faith and Character Study (see here for more). We did so for a variety of reasons. First, we wanted to know the faith and character of our incoming students. As any good missiology or pedagogy course will teach you, you have to know…

“Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world’s memory. The past is erased without stories.” ― Chaim Potok, Old Men At Midnight One Sunday after church, my daughter and our very hip lead pastor began talking about Harry Potter. With the names “Tonks and Lupin,” the differences in education, experience, gender, age, fashion, and…

It is the time of year when those of us who serve as teachers, from college to Kindergarten, are ramping up our preparation for the upcoming term. In my home university, new faculty are arriving on campus this week for onboarding, next week will be devoted to faculty meetings at the university and college level,…

One of the first questions I ask students in my Christian Legal Thought seminar is what they expect Christianity might have to say about law. A common answer is that Christian teaching can provide guidance about what the legal rules should be.  Many of my students have been taught the importance of having a Christian…

A few years back, one of my literature classes read Misha Nogha’s “Chippoke Na Gomi,”Misha Nogha, “Chippoke Na Gomi,” The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 630-636. an intriguing and provocative science fiction story exploring the repercussions of atomic weaponry and the responsibilities we have to one another.This article first…

Every Christian university requires at least one English composition, writing, and/or literature class. Thus, one would think that someone reviewing those course descriptions would find considerable evidence demonstrating how Christianity relates to these basic courses. You would be wrong. We recently analyzed the required gen ed course descriptions at all Protestant and Catholic universities that…