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It’s Ash Wednesday, a time of repentance, and I’m put in mind of an artist of sorrow. Rogier van der Weyden, a 15th-century Netherlandish genius, was known for many things (including an audacious portrait of himself as a saint), See https://collections.mfa.org/objects/31035  but his paintings of Christ’s death are his most profound. They are almost unrivaled…

Landscape view of Salsberry Peak in the Pahrump Hills region, Gale Crater, Mars. Inset: Curiosity Rover “selfie.”  Credit: NASA Part 1. Full speed ahead 2021 will be a busy year for space exploration and commerce with the promise of great advances in science and technology. NASA Highlights will include landing the Mars Perseverance Rover and…

After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in July 2020, I participated in a BLM protest in Harrisburg, PA. I brought along my copy of The Souls of Black Folk by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois. I sat on a step of the State Capitol and read, aloud but quietly, the eleventh…

My friend Todd Steen has written a good and thoughtful article about providing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for all in the United States.  In it, he makes direct references to the way Christian faith might direct our thinking on this subject.  As a theologian with an interest in economics, I would like to respond.…

“Christ Animated Learning” is an inspired title for this blog, for Christ the Logos (“word, thought, rationality”) is always the one who animates (from Latin anima, “spirit, breath of life”) the journey toward Truth that we call “learning.”  The same Spirit who effected my conversion to Classics as a college sophomore, immersing me in the…

Contemporary culture is obsessed with the human body. It (that is, the body) carries so much responsibility. Weak, mortal, finite, it is made to bear burdens of eternity: it is made to be a sign of dignity, meaning and status that is somehow eternal. So, we punish it, whipping it into shape with brutal exercises.…

Although I am a college professor, I must confess that my most important education during college did not come from professors. As an undergraduate majoring in history, political science, and religion at Rice University, I had some great classes with outstanding professors—one even won a Professor of the Year award among faculty for the entire…

A mere four years – something of a lifetime – ago, the Berkley Center asked many scholars and activists to offer advice for the new administration of President Trump. At the time, I argued that the new administration needed to leverage its multilateral assets: that freedom of religion or belief needed American leadership, but that…

Deep into the throes of last semester—at that juncture when I invariably lose the pedagogical forest for the trees—I noticed a reoccurring discussion across each of my classes. While my courses focus uniquely on topics such as analyzing social welfare policies, child welfare practices, and grant writing—one pressing and underlying question kept emerging. That is,…

Back in 1996, my husband and I had a heated debate over the former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s use of the term “irrational exuberance” to explain the bull stock market at that time. He agreed with Greenspan that irrationality was the only explanation for some of the ridiculously inflated price to earnings ratios,…

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman (Crossway, 2020) was named this year’s top book in the Public Theology and Current Events category by The Gospel Coalition. Trueman, a former William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at…

Being an athlete is often depicted as being interchangeable with striving for glory.  Indeed the pinnacle of achievement in sports is almost always depicted as receiving public acclaim and recognition.  The Olympics even mythologize this fact by representing spatially what is implied figuratively by placing the top athlete in each field atop a podium above…

We were in the middle of a staff retreat when the events related to the capital riots began to unfold.  I noticed eyes were darting to phones and news alerts on screens as we worked through strategy and policy for the upcoming Covid-19 impacted semester.  I, too, was distracted and finally stopped the planning to…

For ten months my laboratory has sat empty and dark. But it is never quiet. An aggressive air handling system has covered the vacant benches with humming and whirring through nearly a year of distance learning. My institution went fully online in March, like most other schools, but we continued to be primarily online throughout…

In the summer of 2020 Falls City Press released a collection of essays by David S. Guthrie: Dreaming Dreams for Christian Higher Education (for a 20% discount enter “CSR”). Guthrie is Teaching Professor of Education in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State University, where he has taught since 2014. He is also a…

I imagine that most of us are looking through the binocular lenses of scholarly specialization and Christian faith as we seek to understand the January 6 attack on the Capitol: a day of infamy that will be a defining moment in our students’ lives, much as 9-11, the Challenger explosion, and the assassination of Martin…

Einstein once wrote: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.…

“Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps.”Roger Forsgren, “The Architecture of Evil”, The New Atlantis, Summer 2012. With this sentence, Roger Forsgren opens his article titled “The Architecture of Evil”. Although it was Hitler and his henchmen who unleashed death and destruction during the Second World War, it required railways, factories, warehouses, and…

How do we know Jesus was a woman? Answer: because, even after he was dead he had to get up and serve people. Some context may be helpful. I was the only man in a graduate seminar on feminist rhetoric.  Along with six other Ph.D. students we were part of a list serve and often…

A common approach to the Christmas season is to study the “titles” of Christ, perhaps from Isaiah 9.  Between the season and some recent discussions about the use of “titles” I’ve been reflecting on the use of titles in our culture and my life.  Obviously, current American culture is both informal and egalitarian and becoming…