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Throughout my career in higher education, teaching ethics had a strong academic feel. It is a fascinating discipline with one of the richest literary traditions of any area of study. It did not, however, carry the sense of urgency that other subjects seemed to hold. It was more important in an eternal sense than in…

In a recent blog post, I addressed the sloppy, alarmist reporting about the state of Christian higher education in the United States. The actual trajectory of religious higher education between 2010 and 2019 involved only minuscule decline (-0.1%) and that decline was much less than the -4% enrollment decline among secular universities. In other words,…

Almost forty years ago Alvin Plantinga’s memorable “Advice to Christian Philosophers” set out a three-fold challenge to encourage members of his own academic tribe, but also “Christian intellectuals generally.” First, “to display . . . more independence of the rest of the philosophical world”; second, to “display more integrity in the sense of integral wholeness”;…

This post is the second of a five-part series. The initial segment of the series described how I and seven of my colleagues at Liberty University met regularly in the early months of 2023 to examine the realm of libraries from a distinctively biblical worldview. Specifically, we considered the implications of four “frames” of the…

1981. I stared at this collection of digits for a few moments, letting the gravity of the moment sink in. This was the birth year that a student listed for her parents on a cultural genogram project; it is also the year that I was born. Throughout the years that I have assigned this project…

"'God’s Image cut, or carved in Ebony,' was a phrase first used, we believe by the English Church Historian, Fuller …and assuredly this phrase is among the most striking of the graphic sentences which he stamped so deeply on the republic of letters. There it stands, this beautiful and appropriate piece of imagery, and there…

If you want to learn about the secular university’s pitiful justifications for general education, you simply need to read the recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Repairing General Education: Colleges Struggle to Answer the Question, ‘Why Am I Taking This Class?’” The author accurately writes, “Many students and more than a few professors see general…

Though few of us have the patience to really contemplate them, great pictures are rich “icons” of human nature. They are considered great precisely because they contain timeless, complex, interlocking truths in one small “box.” They are the world’s most dazzlingly efficient form of deep, rich, and instantaneous-yet-endless communication. The old platitude says “a picture…

Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a five-part series that will appear every Wednesday for the next five weeks. Archives and libraries are known from manuscript and archeological evidence to have existed in the Ancient Near East long before the time of Abraham, and they clearly played important roles in the Greco-Roman world.For…

In the early twentieth century, American archeology was dominated by radical skepticism toward the Bible. One academic leader perpetuating this approach early in his career was the famed American archaeologist, William Foxwell Albright. Yet, the establishment of an intellectual friendship initiated by an older evangelical archeologist would eventually lead Albright to abandon his radical skepticism…

“We are not living in an era of change, but a change of era.” - Pope Francis Written on the Feast of Pentecost. Graduation is coming here at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). (Our school year in the PNW starts and ends late compared to the rest of the U.S.). Graduation, of course, is a time…

This past year our university was blessed with a record enrollment of incoming freshmen. Consequently, I taught the largest class of nursing students ever. According to the CDC, they have the tragic distinction of being the class with the highest rates of sadness, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. As a father of four, with two…

Jesus was once asked “Who is my neighbor?” His answer was to tell a story about caring for an enemy, implying that his followers are to serve others in spite of any social barriers between them. Matthew S. Vos explores such barriers as he examines the theme of “the stranger” in sociological theory, Christian theology,…

It was a Tuesday after Saturday’s graduation events. My assistant brought the day’s mail into my office and set the pile in front of me. She had tossed away the obvious junk mail and had taken the correspondence that I needed to deal with out of the envelopes. “I did not open this one,” she…

Back in 2001, I got a dog for my fortieth birthday. Balancing my professorship, a husband who traveled too much for his job, and a home with four children attending four different schools, I wanted a creature in my life who asked for little more than food, water, a good brush down, and a walk.…

Christian higher education currently neglects to teach students how to steward their bodies. How do I know? I recently led a mixed-methods study of Christian student affairs.Perry L. Glanzer et al., Christ-Enlivened Student Affairs: A Guide to Christian Thinking and Practice in the Field (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2020). In a national survey…

As the title makes plain, this is a how-to guide: how to inhabit time. But we already inhabit time. “Human beings dwell temporally,” Smith tells us (27). So, what is there to learn? The answer arises from reflection on the fact that our being in time, our temporality—despite constituting our essence as human beings—is often…

Zero. That’s the overwhelming response when I ask students to number the sermons they’ve heard on Satan or spiritual battle in the past year. If they are not getting this information from the pulpit, where will students hear about a topic so prevalent in the Scriptures? In the previous blog, we considered the biblical support…

“Demons, leave my students alone!” I confess, it’s almost as weird to write this, as it was to pray that day in my classroom in front of wide-eyed students. But, why? After all, I was a faith-professing professor lecturing to Christian students at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) on the topic of gendered…

In Leap of Faith (Paramount Pictures: 1992), Steve Martin offers a modern take on Elmer Gantry as conman and revivalist Jonas Nightengale. In the movie, Nightengale’s bus breaks down while in the small town of Rustwater, Kansas. As he waits for it to be fixed, he decides to run a series of tent meetings complete…