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BlogBook Review

Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy

Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, once quipped that universities have become “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 15. In this context, Kerr also introduces the term “multiversity.” While playful,…
August 3, 2023
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Spiritual Murder 

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…
August 2, 2023
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Becoming a Teacher

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…
July 31, 2023
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Introducing Christian Scholar’s Review Themed Issue: Vocation

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…
July 27, 2023
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Interdisciplinary Research as a Sharing of Gifts, Part 1

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…
July 24, 2023
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J. Robert Oppenheimer: An Autopsy of the American Academic Vocation, Part 3

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…
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J. Robert Oppenheimer: An Autopsy of the American Academic Vocation, Part 1

On Friday, the largest-scale exploration of the American academic vocation will hit theaters. With a rumored marketing budget of $100 million, few of us likely avoided the campaign NBCUniversal unleashed in recent weeks for Christopher Nolan’s next film, Oppenheimer. Viewers of Wimbledon and Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, for example, were repeatedly introduced to snippets…
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The Biblical Worldview and Libraries, Part 5: Library Personnel

This is the last in a series of posts that apply four frames of the biblical narrative—Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation—to the realm of libraries. As I explained in the first post, the series is based in part on the work of a discussion group that convened in my workplace earlier this year. In subsequent…
July 12, 2023
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What If All Our Residence Halls Were Tech Free?

This May I taught a summer course called “Technology and Freedom.” We read many of the usual suspects, including some great Christian critics of technology like Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul. But the course wasn’t really about ideas. Informally we called it “the tech-free dorm course.” The students spent the entire month living together in…
July 10, 2023