Every college student wants to be successful. What do you need for college success? The Jewish and Christian traditions are quite clear about how you should begin any quest for learning or what the Scriptures call wisdom: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7). In fact, the very first university…
In Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, Pastor and Cultural Apologist Voddie Baucham takes up what he believes to be the most important discussion for the contemporary church: social justice. In late June 2021, shortly after the book was published, I wrote a review of the text for the Journal of…
In September of 1930, the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived in New York for his first visit to America. As a teaching fellow at Union Theological Seminary, the young Bonhoeffer spent the next year meeting colleagues like Jean Laserre, a French pacifist, and Frank Fisher, a black seminarian who introduced Bonhoeffer to Abyssinian…
This post will not be about me, but I think I owe my readers some context involving a bit of autobiography to make sense of what follows. I am a theologian who teaches in the math and computer science department of a Christian, liberal arts university (utilizing an MS in Computer Science). This unusual relationship…
These outstanding and quite different contributions to the dialogue between faith and learning in the general area of contemporary psychology share the fundamental conviction that drives the faith/learning dialogue: that the grandeur and scope of Christian truth and of the Gospel of Jesus Christ defies any minimalist constraints to the merely spiritual or to the…
“This one is broken!” Normally hearing these words from my toddler would make me assume something valuable, specifically something of mine, has been thrown somewhere, but this time I could understand the frustration. Watching my daughter struggle with a small shape sorting toy was to observe the resiliency of the human spirit, or perhaps just…
Snails, it turns out, have things to teach us, even for folk with advanced degrees. Things that could be relevant to an online course. Things that carry a faint echo of wisdom’s laughter at the delights of creation, as narrated in Proverbs 8. Things that also have to do with how we use technology for…
This is the third in a series of reflections on student vocation. I began in February by dipping into Protestant theologies of vocation and noting that the Christian’s basic calling to love God and neighbor in Christ is to be worked out in whatever provisional, specific calling they find themselves in. I pointed out that…
In early February 2022, American Reformer published a provocative article by Caleb Morell titled “Stop Finding Your Identity in Christ.” Morell first notes the prevalence of this “identity in Christ” phrase in Christian literature, explaining that this language “exploded in the 1980s, particularly as Christians began borrowing this emerging term from secular psychology.” In the…
(Book Review: Sherwood Lingenfelter, Teamwork Cross-Culturally: Christ-Centered Solutions for Leading Multinational Teams. Baker Academic, 2022). In a world where just a word (not to mention phrases, topics, or modes of interaction) may cause offense or even trauma, perhaps the safer course may be to keep to ourselves and at least do no harm. The very…
Two comments about courses of study separated by more than 80 years have me thinking again about the relational fabric of my classes in the time of COVID. One of the comments arose from the learning experiences created by German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the seminary he led at Finkenwalde in the late 1930s. Bonhoeffer…
DAVID: Some years ago, I was teaching an intensive graduate class in curriculum studies to a group that included students from multiple countries. The first significant written assignment came a few days into the course. I asked students to write about how their upbringing and identity were likely to bias their curriculum work. Which of…
By Crystal Bruxvoort, Davi Chang Ribeiro Lin, Olga Nakato Mugerwa, and David I. Smith Early in his book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer comments that “we belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.” This short sentence undercuts a variety of common bases for the experience of community. We like to get together with…
I was recently provoked to fresh reflection on two very familiar passages as I prepared to share them with education students. One is about schooling; the other is about being born anew. I had admired them both, but now gained a fresh sense of their interconnection. Both are drawn from a vivid allegory that predates…
One morning in July I sat with some fellow faculty at the tail end of a writing retreat, and the conversation turned to the dawning realization that there is less summer before us than behind us, and a new semester is lumbering in our direction at what feels like increasing pace. Some shared their perennial…
“I don’t understand why Christians have to be so intolerant of others.” I had just finished a moderated discussion on religious pluralism with an articulate professor from another university who argued that all religions and forms of spirituality are equally valid options in today’s diverse world. I agreed that different religions and spiritual practices could…
