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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…

“Where is God in Ukraine?” I was set to start my lecture when a student asked this disturbing question. Her sincerity was evident and by the reaction of her classmates, the question resonated. News feeds had been filled with heartbreaking stories and images of the devastation in Ukraine. Daily we had learned of civilians being…

Evangelicals do not have a reputation for wise and irenic engagement with modern science. Scholars at The Henry Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School have been trying to change this characterization of hostile defensiveness, especially through their “Creation Project” that has brought evangelical scholarly focus to the doctrine of creation over recent years, of which…

{The following excerpt comes from Matt Hoven, J.J. Carney, and Max Engel, On the Eighth Day: A Catholic Theology of Sport (Cascade/Wipf & Stock: Eugene, OR, 2022), 115-7. Used with permission from Wipf and Stock Publishers. Available for purchase at wipfandstock.com, Amazon.com, and elsewhere}. The vast majority of elite athletes practice superstitions—despite the fact that…

Giant kelp. It’s a species of algae that can grow over 50 meters tall, making it the largest marine algae.  It’s also one of the fastest growing living things on our planet.“Giant Kelp.” SIMoN. Accessed June 13, 2022. https://sanctuarysimon.org/dbtools/species-database/id/40/macrocystis/pyrifera/giant-kelp. On its own, giant kelp is an impressive part of God’s creation. However, I’d argue that…

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”                         Matthew 6:1 I rarely see so many public intellectuals misunderstand the implications of a Supreme Court case as the recent Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision…