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Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, a diverse group of more than fifty North American-based evangelical academics, publishers, and church leaders—both young mavericks and more senior statesmen—gathered at the Downtown Chicago YMCA to discuss the need for greater evangelical social concern. The impetus for the conference had occurred earlier in the spring at the first Calvin…

In January, the Florida Board of Governors removed Principles of Sociology as a general education core course option in all twelve Florida public universities. The verdict came a week after the Florida State Board of Education had already unanimously voted to remove sociology as a core course offering in all twenty-eight Florida public colleges. As…

“Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful.” These are the words of the web pioneer Marc Andreessen, writing about “Why AI Will Save the World.” Such optimistic claims are not new. The rise of the world wide web came with predictions that it would be…

It feels like students have stopped coming to my office hours. Or at least, the number of office hour appointments on my calendar has slowed to a trickle. What might explain the underutilization of office hours? I chalk it up to multiple factors. It could be that the articulated benefits of meeting with professors outside…

It is a great time to graduate college in America. Unemployment rates are hovering at around 3.7%, as low as they have been since the 1960s and approaching what economists would consider full employment.Niasse, Amina. "Unemployment rises in nearly a third of US states in December." Reuters. January 23, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/unemployment-rose-nearly-third-us-states-december-2024-01-23/. The hot job market…

No metaphor is perfect, but the most iconic metaphor in biology, the metaphor that might be the only thing you remember from high school biology, is one that conveys almost no information at all. I am talking about calling mitochondria the “powerhouse.” When the lights go out in a storm, no one ever says, “There…

“It just wears you out being with nice people,” Stanley Hauerwas points out in a 2019 YouTube video. Having lived in the South most of his life, he likely knows this reality from experience. As Hauerwas did not describe the genesis of such feelings, I will suggest four reasons why this reality is the case.…

“Nice” is not an English word used in any serious Bible translation and “being nice” is certainly not a biblical virtue. Although its close cousin, kindness, is a Christian virtue, being nice is to Christian kindness what being empathetic is to Christian compassion. It is a partial secular substitute for the more robust Christian virtue…

In yesterday’s post, I recounted Burtchaell’s argument about the threats to Christian higher education and my response recorded in the book, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.Robert Benne Quality with Soul : How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI:…

During my sabbatical year of 1985–86 at St. Edmunds College of Cambridge University, I had the good fortune of having many conversations about Christian higher education with James Burtchaell, who also had a year-long sabbatical there. He had recently moved from the provost’s office of Notre Dame to its theology department. I had moved in…

I had the pleasure of addressing the St. Andrew’s Society of Savannah on November 30, 2023, on the occasion of their 286th St. Andrew’s Day Dinner. A friend had suggested me as the speaker because I had written a three-volume biography of C. S. Lewis. Lewis was a lovely man with many fine qualities, but…

This year, at my daughter’s suburban, mostly upper-income middle school, a certain kind of water bottle has become au courant. It is expensive and unwieldy, but there’s a sense that one can’t do without it. I found out today that another, nearby middle school (no surprise) is aflutter about the same bottle. To be deprived…

It has been just over a year now since ChatGPT’s release, and the shock waves from that seismic event keep rippling through society at large. One means of measuring its impact on our collective imagination is by the number of notifications my faculty inbox has received for professional articles and workshops on generative AI, or…

Every year I offer a sociology of sport course at the conservative Presbyterian college where I teach. As this course takes place in the spring semester, I’ve been able to time a Super Bowl lecture to correspond with the actual event. Much of my lecture centers on identifying and analyzing the roles played by women…

Social Class in the Super Bowl God’s wrath is kindled when the needs of vulnerable people in a society—widows, orphans, and strangers—are neglected and the “business as usual” of the wealthy takes priority. A Nielson survey found that more than 208 million viewers watched Super Bowl 2022. Nearly 90% of all people using a television…

And the Prime Minister sucks ice cream in the company of a happy band of children, while a naked man, sores on his neck, lies for days in Washington Boulevard gnawing chicken bones. . . . And there’s a kung fu movie in every town. . . . And there’s dancing in paradise.-Bruce Cockburn, “Dancing…

In a well-known essay on the study of international relations, political scientist Robert Cox made a useful distinction between what he calls “problem-solving theory” and “critical theory.” Cox’s distinction articulates something pretty commonsensical, which is why I assign excerpts from his essay in lots of different classes that have nothing to do with international relations.…

Once upon a time, Paul Hunham,Played, in a command performance, by Paul Giamatti. the lead character of Alexander Payne’s recent film The Holdovers,The Holdovers is now available for streaming on Peacock. thought he could make a difference. That’s why he went into teaching in the first place. He felt a calling to prepare students for…

We were doing an interview on an NPR station, a kind of “point-counterpoint” thing. The other interviewee was a self-identified agnostic, and the topic was the rights of academic institutions to “discriminate” on the basis of religious beliefs. My dialogue partner was not overtly hostile to religion as such. Indeed he said some nice things…

I can remember the first time Sabbath became real to me. Sure, I had learned about it in Sunday School as a child or even heard professors emphasize its importance in my transition to graduate school. But certainly, I didn’t really need it. I was able to get things done and maintain both a positive…