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Filling the Well When the Water Runs Dry

The lackluster Department of Labor April jobs report took just about everyone by surprise: the US economy showed a net increase of only 266,000 nonfarm jobs. With the country opening up after the winter’s lockdowns, some estimates projected that the total would be closer to a million new jobs.  Did this mean that the economy…
July 7, 2021
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Earth Has a Pulse, Scientists Say

If you follow the latest science news, whether it’s a newsfeed from Science Daily or a casual listen to Ira Flatow on Friday afternoons, you may have learned that Earth, indeed, has a pulse. As reported in the journal Geoscience Frontiers, rigorous statistical analysis for the timing of 89 major geological events of the past…
July 6, 2021
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Reading George Marsden with Gen Z

Each spring semester for the past twenty-odd years I have assigned the same essay to my junior-level history majors at the Christian college where I teach. In it historian George Marsden navigates the complex relationship between personal faith commitments and serious academic scholarship, laying out what I believe numbers among the most compelling visions for…
July 2, 2021
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Sanctuary

Professional art historians are among the luckiest of God’s children. Our vocations consist in the study and praise of beautiful things. If we are fortunate to have an academic job, we can use the summer months to travel and discover even more beauty - and count this useful, as well! So it was that I…
July 1, 2021
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Guest Post – Deconversion: The All-Or-Nothing Fallacy

It seems that not a month goes by without a well-known Christian announcing on social media that they have left the faith. More troubling, but less sensational is that for each celebrity deconversion there are hundreds of unknown believers who deconvert that don’t get the headlines. Deconversion from Christianity is a growing and troubling trend.…
June 30, 2021
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Guest Post: General Systems Theory for a Kinder, Gentler World

“Ship, Then Test” That phrase headlines a section from entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, and engineers would call these fighting words.Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything (New York: Penguin Group, 2004) Yet many businesspeople would nod in agreement with the thought.In all fairness,…
June 29, 2021
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Theo-Drama and Mise-en-Scéne

In my current book project, The Wages of Cinema: Looking through the Lens of Dorothy L. Sayers, I argue that full appreciation for the relationship between Christianity and film necessitates knowledge about the history of theater: a word that comes from the Greek “to see.” Seeing the medium, whether on stage or screen, echoes one…
June 28, 2021
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“The Reservoir From Which We Need to Drink”: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae

Forty years ago Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory unexpectedly became a touchstone text, one that scholars across disciplines read with unusual urgency.  In the midst of the postmodern turn, MacIntyre served notice that modernity’s increasingly evident deficits—cultural, political, and intellectual—might be fruitfully addressed by arguments stemming from ontologies believed by many, perhaps most, to…
June 25, 2021
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Guest Post: Jacob’s Well: Pride and Grace in Eden, Arkansas

The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps. -Proverbs 16:9 In my first CSR post, I wrote about Nomadland’s cardiac geography: protagonist Fern’s wistful spirit and her fellow van-dwellers’ radical sense of independence. Their pride manifests as constant movement—perpetual flight—which suggests that spiritual restlessness results in physical waywardness. A similar…
June 24, 2021
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Guest Post: Lived Religion and Sports

Lived religion Today’s elite athletes have much at stake in sports.  Climbing up the rankings within youth, collegiate and professional sports is no doubt daunting, where the victor has the best chance of advancing and everybody will seemingly do whatever it takes to win.  Competition can produce uncertainty and anxiety in the lives of athletes,…
June 21, 2021
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A National Experiment in Ignoring Fathers

Betrayed. That’s how Olga, an education official responsible for moral upbringing in the Soviet Ministry of Education, felt after the downfall of communism. In an interview five years later, she shared with me her devastation: For many years, I had been sure that I was doing exactly what is needed. I was horrified when I…
June 18, 2021
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If a Tree Falls on a Campus, Does It Make Any Sense?

In the space of about a year, three big trees fell in middle of the Seattle Pacific University campus. All of these were close to the Tiffany Loop, where we hold an “Ivy Cutting” graduation ceremony under the canopy of branches every June (when weather and pandemics permit). Each time a tree fell, I’d remember…
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Guest Post: On Wolterstorff on Kant, Part I: On Fallibility

I recently had occasion to read one of the more obscure publications by one of the more famous Christian philosophers of our time, Nicholas Wolterstorff. An article he first presented as a conference paper at Calvin College (now University) in 2000 is currently available in the handsomely produced two-volume series of Wolterstorff works edited by…
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Student Characteristics: Chasing the 99

As a journal editor, I intermittently see articles submitted that choose as their rhetorical opening some generalization, often alarmist, about “today’s students” and their supposed challenges or deficiencies. As someone who is regularly involved in providing professional development on the topic of teaching and learning, I also sometimes get asked to provide input on the…
June 11, 2021
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The Fortress of Christian Higher Education

Decades ago, when I informed an acquaintance that I had accepted a tenure-track position at a Christian college, he shifted his eyes awkwardly before smiling out, “Sounds like a nice place to send my daughters.” I repeat the appalling comment—appalling on many different levels—in order to contrast it with a different kind of parental approach…
June 10, 2021