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“The way in which we describe the world determines what we think we see. What we think we see determines how we act on what we think we see. Descriptions matter.” This summer I had the privilege to hear Dr. John Swinton speak. He is Chair of Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of…

A little while back, I attended two different conference presentations where colleagues within the Christian academy were presenting on the topic of integrating faith and learning (IFL). In both cases, I was eager to hear the presenter’s thoughts and to pick up some ideas that I could incorporate into my own teaching practice. Instead, as…

Business and legal history are not the most likely sources of Christian illumination. In this post, however, I will expose the contrasting viewpoints of God and fallen humanity through the tiny lens of a single legal form of business organization, the partnership. Partnerships, in one form or another, have been around since ancient times. One…

Doctrine is divisive, and division is difficult. Why should Christian higher education institutions (CHEIs) take the time to articulate faith statements that express their beliefs and distinctives knowing it will lead to division and difficulty? In many ways, would it not be much easier just to operate under the general label of “Christian” and not…

“Most social situations are not moral, because there is no conflict between the role-taking expectations of one person and another.”—Lawrence KohlbergLawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, Essays on Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 1:143. As mentioned in yesterday's post, early in the history of…

In 1765 two early presidents of American colonial colleges made their last ethical stands in the form of two published writings. In many respects, both writings maintained the counter-cultural elements that comprised the thinking of early Puritans. Neither author even mentioned Aristotle or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in these last works, the author and text that…

While there are many ways to integrate faith into a discipline, some scholars argue that faith integration into any academic discipline should begin with the presuppositions which undergird that discipline. In some disciplines, presuppositions (and their impacts upon the discipline) are evident. For example, if I presuppose that there is a good and loving God…

Maria was dead. The hospital staff worked heroically to save her, but the heart attack was just too severe. Somehow, though, Maria saw the whole resuscitation process from above. She saw something else, too, as she drifted from the room. A tennis shoe: Third floor of the hospital, on an outside window ledge. Maria would…

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. This famous poem by Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Yeats captures the anxieties he felt as he scanned the social horizon of his day. The forces…

I made many mistakes in my oral qualifying exam, halfway through grad school. The first was probably that I wore a double-breasted blazer at least 5 years out of style, as a committee member noted at the beginning. More substantial was the fact that I stumbled over explaining my collaborator’s techniques to the committee, one…

In my role as an Art History professor at Seattle Pacific University, I have accompanied students to Rome, Italy six times. We stay there for about a month, visiting umpteen million churches, in addition to wonderful museums, grand palazzos, and major archaeological sites. Among these sites, the churches are the real treasures - pedagogically, artistically,…

“This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you.’” - Jeremiah 30:2 (NIV) I remember as a college freshman seeing a cartoon taped on the door of one of the physics labs in Cornelia Hall at Iona College. It showed a student…

If your campus is anything like mine, there has been an increasing emphasis on students completing internships during their time in college or university. A decade or two ago, students completing one internship were ahead of many of their peers, while today, many students are completing multiple internships. At my institution, there has been increasing…

This year it finally hit me. I’ve been going about self-care all wrong. I have been thorough in my pursuit of self-care practices that would chip away at the weight of professional responsibilities that comes with overseeing the needs of between 360 and 2,700 students (depending on my on-call schedule). I’ve added stretch breaks and…

Like a lot of western Christians, I did a short-term mission trip as a teen overseas to volunteer at a school and it was a deeply transformative experience. Many of my friends' Facebook profile pictures broadcasted them beside the sweet smiling faces of children in their freshly painted schools, desks gleaming and polished. It's a…

“Exvangelicalism” is a relatively new term for a much older phenomenon: those who’ve been raised as evangelicals coming to realize that they no longer identify as such, and intentionally reckoning with the continuing impact of that tradition in their lives. Philosophers have not had much to say about this phenomenon – until now.  These four…

Book Review: George Yancey, Beyond Racial Division: A Unifying Alternative to Colorblindness and Antiracism. IVP, 2022. Does George Yancey have any friends? His new book Beyond Racial Division rejects dominant models for racial engagement, an unpopular approach that clears space for a third way. In challenging colorblindness, the perspective probably held among most evangelicals, he…

In part 1 of this series, I attempted to respond to a student who asked, “Where is God in Ukraine?” My answer, in part, was to appeal to the oft-neglected doctrine of common grace where God saturates our rebellious world with good gifts in the form of medical discoveries, technology, morality, science, the arts, and…