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One of my most memorable birthdays was a special gift from my wife. Although she was worn down from health challenges to our one-year-old son while living in Moscow, she gifted me with a whole day to spend at my favorite art gallery, the Tretyakov Gallery. Unfortunately, like most things in Russia, its marketing today…

In an age of political polarization and civil unrest, many have lost faith in universities as promoters of positive engagement in the public square. With only 36 percent of Americans confident in universities, public trust in higher education has fallen to historic lows. As protests rage, chancellors defend free speech while grasping in vain for…

In the realm of nursing education, few experiences are as profoundly transformative as clinical rotations in homeless shelters. These settings provide a unique platform for undergraduate nursing students to practice their skills while encountering the complexities of care for individuals experiencing homelessness. Undergraduate students all participate in the care of people experiencing homelessness for at…

As a psychologist trained in the United States, I tend to view the expression of emotions as a good thing. So, the flipside of the expression of emotion – restraint of feelings, or emotional self-control – is sometimes viewed as an unhealthy practice, or at least a corollary of unfavorable health and mental health outcomes.…

Matthew Barrett’s The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church seeks to retell the story of the Protestant Reformation by focusing on the connection between the Reformation and the theological heritage of the medieval West. Drawing on the historiographical interventions of a previous generation, Barrett sets out to reveal that the…

The Centers for Disease Control concluded in a recent study that approximately 61 million – one in four – Americans have a classified and diagnosed disability. The National Institute of Health (NIH) indicated in 2022 that the disability community represents more than 27% of the U.S. adult population, making that community the single largest minority…

Within the field of education today, we are faced with many unprecedented challenges. From press to politics, the world of education has been painted bleakly in the post covid era. Burnout numbers are high and enrollment in teacher education programs is waning.  As teacher educators, we see the need to help preservice teachers develop skills…

A self-identifying evangelical Christian college that welcomed prominent theologically conservative and liberal Protestants scholars and pastors to campus for a Bible conference might defy the expectations of many today. But this happened annually at Grove City College during the tenure of its founding president Isaac Ketler’s annual Bible conference in the late nineteenth and early…

Crossing Cultures with the Gospel is about just that, and its wisdom and insight easily extends into Christian college and university classrooms of all subjects. Miriam Adeney’s foreword sums up the book perfectly: Whiteman’s charisma and vitality distilled into wisdom that can be put into practice. Drawing from nearly a half-century of missionary experience, including…

I have spent the majority of my training and professional career in large public universities. In fact, from kindergarten through PhD and the first thirteen years of my academic career were in public institutions.  So I received little training on faith integration and Christ-animated learning during those periods.  However, when I arrived at Samford University…

This blog post explores the intersection of faith and business education by incorporating "spiritual assignments" within the framework of a modern business school curriculum. I aim to share the possible connection between these two realms and shed light on educators' invaluable assistance in fostering students’ comprehension of this connection. In this post I will prompt…

How does a Christian university change a culture and overcome fear, differences of opinions, and a faculty body comprised of diverse Christian traditions? How does the university guard against implementing an administratively-driven, plug-and-play approach to faith and learning integration that would infringe on the faculty member’s academic freedom? The starting point for us at Samford…

What is—what should be—the Christian’s role in politics? There is no easy answer to this question. The present agitation among evangelicals in this election year recalls a debate extending back centuries. In the 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church and the kings of Europe were locked in a contentious alliance—each side trying to maneuver into a…

If I were forced to select a single passage from C. S. Lewis’s hefty corpus that sums up most fully his genius for uniting reason and imagination, for exposing the fault lines in the monolith of modernism, and for expressing profound insights in the simplest of terms, I would choose one that occurs in Chapter…

One of the exercises that I often have both classroom students and survey respondents do is to prioritize their identities. I first ask them to consider the range of identities they might apply to themselves, and then I ask them to rank their top three. I find the answers produce significant clarity about my audience,…

I think human beings are built to want to impress someone. To please someone. To get approval. It’s there, palpably, in everyone’s eyes, if you know how to look. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this - nothing at all. It’s built into the tripartite structure of the Trinity, wherein Father and Son gaze upon each…

Part-way through teaching a new course on faith and pedagogy last year I noticed an emerging pattern that had not been a fully conscious part of my plan. An unanticipated trend slowly turned into a conscious strategy that threaded its way through several major topics. It started a few weeks into the semester as we…

Part guidance to young lawyers and law students and part Christian apologetic for the legal profession, Robert F. Cochran, Jr.’s new book, The Servant Lawyer, is a much-needed addition to the dialogue between the church, the legal profession, and the communities they both serve. The overall tone of the text is prescriptive. Cochran argues that…

Throughout our scholarly careers, we have consistently been struck by an empirical finding we often encounter. The most important religious variable predictor in studies is usually not how people identify (e.g., Christian) or what they believe (e.g., certain views of the Bible). Instead, it is simply a weekly action. How often do they go to…

For my own part, I know I must keep alive in myself what I have once known and grown into. —Thomas MertonThomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, Image, 1968), 187.  My wide-ranging but low-built apartment complex, constructed before I was born, values its old maples and oaks, though time has reduced…