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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…

A Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Dr. Jill Biden to forego the use of her duly earned title has spurred recent conversations about the use of academic titles. Perry Glanzer’s recent post calling for “A Christian Reappraisal of Academic Titles” offers the refreshing promise to reframe these conversations through the lens of Christian values.…

I have been posting a lot on race lately. And that will continue for the foreseeable future. To be honest I thought I was mostly done talking on racial issues about ten years ago. At that time I had come out with a book – Transcending Racial Barriers – which basically stated what I wanted…

It is now 50 years since Robert Greenleaf coined the term “Servant Leadership” in his groundbreaking essay, The Servant as a Leader.Robert Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader(Newton Center, MA: The Robert K. Greenleaf Center, 1970). In a break from command and control strategies of the past, Greenleaf’s leadership theory required that a leader must be a servant first…

What qualities does it take to be a great scientist? You might think of intellect, great experimental technique, original thinking, and endless hard work. Humility may not be the first thing that springs to mind. Nevertheless, humility is a very helpful virtue in science, and I think it has played an important role part in…

In a matter of months, our graduating seniors will be looking to land in the places where their “deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”This often used definition of calling comes from Frederick Buechner’s Wishful Thinking: A Seekers ABC (San Francisco: Harper-One, 1993), 118-9. If economists are right, however, the post Covid-19 job market will likely resemble the…

I ended last year with some reflections on how to end a semester. Here I offer some reflections on how to begin one. They were provoked by a chance encounter with an introductory Spanish grammar text. It begins with these two sentences:“Grammar is one of the most difficult (read: boring!) parts of learning a language.…

At the end of a busy and tiring semester, I asked blog contributors if they had a favorite faith-learning book of the year.  I received suggestions from a variety of blog authors and disciplines. A book by a professor from Rice University (go owls), Elaine Howard Ecklund, received Ruth Bancewicz and Clay Carlson’s votes for…

In a recent New York Times column, Ross Douthat explored “the reasons behind a seemingly unreasonable belief” (namely, the belief that the presidential election was stolen). Some points that Douthat raises in his essay about this “post-truth” age have implications for our task in helping our students to research well, with soundness of materials as…