In my research on Christian higher education, I have found that one of the most important differences between Protestant and Catholic institutions pertains to their executive leadership teams. Over half of U.S. Catholic universities have someone titled a Vice President for Mission on their executive leadership team. The importance of these positions was demonstrated a…
Brad Leithauser’s new book, Rhyme’s Rooms, is a feast, a palace, a work of beauty that deserves a wide audience beyond the academy, as well as inclusion in any serious course on poetry. It also seems to be Christian scholarship of the best sort: serious intellectual work conversing in a rigorous and diverse secular profession,…
Brad Leithauser’s new book, Rhyme’s Rooms, is a feast, a palace, a work of beauty that deserves a wide audience beyond the academy, as well as inclusion in any serious course on poetry. It also seems to be Christian scholarship of the best sort: serious intellectual work conversing in a rigorous and diverse secular profession,…
Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a five-part series that will appear every Wednesday for the next five weeks. Archives and libraries are known from manuscript and archeological evidence to have existed in the Ancient Near East long before the time of Abraham, and they clearly played important roles in the Greco-Roman world….
Christian higher education currently neglects to teach students how to steward their bodies. How do I know? I recently led a mixed-methods study of Christian student affairs. In a national survey of student affairs leaders, we gave them sixteen different themes that they might emphasize on their campus and asked them to rank them. Educating…
Some years back, I started an experiment of sorts by sharing a poem each day on Facebook. Circa 2016, social media was becoming increasingly acrimonious, and I thought such a practice might be one way to shine a small but persistent light and beat back the darkness, at least in my little corner of the…
Jamal is a Black student in a predominately White Christian college. During a discussion in class, one of his White classmates, Blake, states, “I don’t see why Black people are so angry about slavery. They’ve gotten so many benefits since then, like affirmative action, welfare, scholarships, and government programs to give them a lift. If I had all that help, I’d be fine.” Jamal is furious but is worried that responding will further ostracize him in a school where he’s already struggling to fit in.
When you go on sabbatical, there are two common questions that are asked before and throughout: “What are you working on?” and “Where are you travelling?” This fall semester, I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a semester-long sabbatical, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked both of these. My colleagues, my family,…
“We Can’t Go On Together with Suspicious Minds” –Elvis Ever since the Fall, we have experienced gender division and alienation. Whether throughout human history we have improved or are going backward in this area, depends upon what one views as the end or…
When I was a doctoral student, one mentor secretly sent their friend (another professor) to my poster at a professional conference to ask the most difficult methodological and statistical questions about my research content. I think my mentor viewed this as an initiation of some kind to the academic presentation experience. Suffice it to say,…
Reviewed by Alice L. Laffey, Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross In the past 35 years this reviewer has read many books in the field of biblical studies and many books on the environment. There has been an occasional book that has combined biblical studies and the environmental crisis, but these usually have been…
Since I was a child, music has been an integral part of my development. In fact, I find it difficult to recall times in my life when music was not omnipresent—from singing in my preschool church choir to contributing my soprano voice to what is now the Houston Boychoir (that is, until being dismissed when…
Lenore M. Knight Johnson is associate professor of Sociology and co-director of the Honors Program at Trinity Christian College. Crumbling public schools. Gun violence. Loss. Failure. Death. Grief. The stories we commonly hear of Chicago paint a grim picture dominated by all that is broken in the third largest city in the United States. Yet…
Huge pleasures … sometimes (if we are careless) not even acknowledged or remembered, invade us from [real, lived life]. Hence the unreasonable happiness which sometimes surprises a man at those very hours which ought, according to all objective rules, to have been the most miserable. Introduction In a recent online article entitled “The Pursuit of…
Historically the nursing profession originated within a rich context of Christian values and beliefs. For example, in the Canadian context where I work and teach early Canadian nursing was managed and conducted by religious denominations, especially by Roman Catholic female orders. As followers of Christ, their patient care was guided by Christian theology and ethics….
By the power of the Holy Spirit, my maternal grandmother used to pick up rattlesnakes without harm. The church I have been a member of for decades now is affiliated with the Assemblies of God (though you might need a court order to find that out). This connects me to Amos Yong, an author of…
You’ve heard the story. Advanced technology is created, turns deviant, and coldly proceeds to supplant humanity. It is one of the more enduring science fiction tropes. From the cautionary imagery of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Tom Cruise battling Artificial Intelligence in the latest Mission Impossible blockbuster, the robots going rogue theme consistently occupies our imaginative…
By the power of the Holy Spirit, my maternal grandmother used to pick up rattlesnakes without harm. The church I have been a member of for decades now is affiliated with the Assemblies of God (though you might need a court order to find that out). This connects me to Amos Yong, an author of…
This virtue is not on any of the lists of character qualities for character education in public schools. One will also not find it on lists of virtues compiled by positive psychology scholars. Yet, it is perhaps one of the most important missing virtues among North American college students today. For example, Christian Smith found…
