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For many faculty with school-age children at home, it is a common dilemma that inevitably comes around a couple of times a year: our children’s school vacation dates (e.g., spring break) rarely align with ours. In the grand scheme of things that truly trouble our world, this is not a big source of angst; but…

Stanley Hauerwas and others have noted how Christian ethics often has been dominated by moral decisionism. Moral decisionism is an approach to ethics that is preoccupied with difficult questions or hard cases of moral dilemmas (e.g., moral quandaries about the beginning or end of life decisions). This way of moral reasoning puts us as individuals…

In my research on Christian higher education, I have found that one of the most important differences between Protestant and Catholic institutions pertains to their executive leadership teams.See for example two recent publications, Perry L. Glanzer, Theodore F. Cockle, Jessica Martin, and Scott Alexander, “Getting Rid of “Church-Related” Colleges and Universities: Applying a New Operationalizing…

Matt Tomlinson, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, has made a major contribution to missiology with this book, although he may not have set out to reach that particular crowd. Tomlinson is an anthropologist trained in linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent several decades researching Christianity in the…

A telos means what something is for, the ultimate end at which it aims. The telos of an acorn is to be an oak tree. The telos of a human community is to enable the flourishing of its members, and ultimately of the whole human family. Christianity maintains that the telos of a human being…

This piece is a slightly adapted version of a recent editorial written for the International Journal of Christianity and Education. In the preface to his recent book Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching,Mark D. Jordan, Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Mark Jordan (2021) recalls his experiences as a young teacher who “found many…

A few years ago my oldest son took a required sociology course at Baylor for a general education class that introduced him to sociological theory. He found it uninteresting and irrelevant to his life. Indeed, surveys discover most students find general education uninteresting and irrelevant to their lives (for a review of the research see…

In yesterday's post, I maintained that our talents are, just like our very lives, gifts from God. Recognizing that our lives and talents are gifts has three important implications for athletes: gifts must be cultivated, gifts are temporary, and gifts must be used well. These facts—regarding the nature and purpose of athletic gifts—are not often…

In my last post, I focused on the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno. There I attempted to draw lessons out of Dante’s text regarding the place of courage in sport. Here, I want to extend the examination to the second book of the Divine Comedy, the Purgatory. In this post, I will…

In the Seattle Art Museum, there is a little painting that often perplexes my students. It shows a scrawny, aged, half-nude man kneeling on desert ground and facing a small crucifix mounted on a stick. His left arm is extended with its empty hand splayed; his right hand holds a gray, prism-shaped rock. And despite…

Earlier today as I was scrolling through my phone’s camera roll, I paused at pictures of March 2021. My son and daughter, five and six then, were masked at the grocery store in the canned vegetables section. The next picture was them a few months later, masked at the playground. As I scrolled through the…

During the pandemic, many of our relationships with others, known or unknown, found a new low as we were, for a time, unable to be with them and have our shattered perceptions of them re-calibrated. So here is the challenge of the modern post-pandemic world, especially for the Christian: our social discourse feels intractably conflictual.…

Relationships, even with people we like, permanently and precariously live on the precipice of disintegration. They are only possible in the context of love, which in turn can only be sustained in the context of another relationship – with the triune God. The reason for this tendency towards disintegration that is recovered through love lies…

If I could tell my college-aged self to read just one book, it would be The Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph B. Soloveitchik.It was published by Doubleday as a book in 2006, but its original form was an essay published in 1965 in Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 7:2 (Summer 1965). To minimize…

I recently found myself explaining again the value of a liberal arts education. I fell into using the same language I have used for hundreds of other students over the years. I was offering the same sorts of justifications that were used on me as a biochemistry major in the 1990s when I was told…

It is a truism in higher education, especially at liberal-arts institutions, that interdisciplinary collaboration promotes academic excellence—that it forms well-rounded students and fosters communities of intellectual creativity. We want our students to combine ideas from multiple disciplines in order to be critical and flexible thinkers. They should study philosophy and literature so that they can…

Bill was one of my very best friends in college. We went to music school together, we played in bands, and we pledged a fraternity. Bill’s daughter, Kaylie is a graduate of the university where I currently teach and sang in our university choir. So as Bill and his wife Shelia would attend Kaylie’s choir…

This series is adapted from a chapter in Keith Loftin’s Rekindling an Old Light: The Virtue and Value of Christ-Shaped Liberal Arts Learning (High Bridge Books, 2022, published in conjunction with Moral Apologetics Press). Literature can give us ears to hear and sensitize our eyes to see goodness, truth, and beauty—in fact to effect union…