When I teach our Natural Sciences Capstone seminar class, I must give the graduating seniors a challenging, cumulative assignment, appropriate to a 1-credit seminar course that meets once a week. In my class, these opposing requirements are met by assigning them to write a two-page proposal for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program…
“I will endeavor by a very simple and commonplace method to lead you by experience into the divine darkness,” wrote Nicholas of Cusa in 1453 to the monks at Tegernsee. In 2023, our faculty/staff reading group discussed Nicholas’s method in a conference room with sunlight streaming in through a wall of windows. But to Nicholas,…
Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, once quipped that universities have become “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” While playful, the quip gives voice to what can be called a crisis of coherence in higher education, an absence of broad, unifying values and commitments…
Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, once quipped that universities have become “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” While playful, the quip gives voice to what can be called a crisis of coherence in higher education, an absence of broad, unifying values and commitments…
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….
I teach literature today in no small part thanks to Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane’s realistic novella depicting the impoverished conditions of life in the Bowery at the turn of the twentieth century. When I first encountered the story, I was immediately captivated by Crane’s ability to use mere words to bring…
Jesus was once asked “Who is my neighbor?” His answer was to tell a story about caring for an enemy, implying that his followers are to serve others in spite of any social barriers between them. Matthew S. Vos explores such barriers as he examines the theme of “the stranger” in sociological theory, Christian theology,…
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,…
Jesus was once asked “Who is my neighbor?” His answer was to tell a story about caring for an enemy, implying that his followers are to serve others in spite of any social barriers between them. Matthew S. Vos explores such barriers as he examines the theme of “the stranger” in sociological theory, Christian theology,…
Editor’s note: This blog is part II of a two-part series based on questions Professor Kim received from his two daughters, Alyssa (7th grade) and Abigail (5th grade), after taking them to his class one day. For Part I see here. Abigail: Do you like your students? Do they like you? Yes, Abigail, I do…
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…
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,…
It is a truism in higher education, especially at liberal-arts institutions, that interdisciplinary collaboration promotes academic excellence—that it forms well-rounded students and fosters communities of intellectual creativity. We want our students to combine ideas from multiple disciplines in order to be critical and flexible thinkers. They should study philosophy and literature so that they can…
Bill was one of my very best friends in college. We went to music school together, we played in bands, and we pledged a fraternity. Bill’s daughter, Kaylie is a graduate of the university where I currently teach and sang in our university choir. So as Bill and his wife Shelia would attend Kaylie’s choir…
The sky is falling rhetoric tends to be overused when it comes to Christian higher education (CHE). This past month, one person tweeted upon learning that Trinity International University is discontinuing residential and in-person undergraduate education, “Christian higher ed is imploding.” This tweet was less reflective of empirical reality and more reflective of the struggles…
This article explores, through the writings of French critic André Bazin, how cinema finds its roots in the capacity of documenting traces of the world and in the osmotic relationship between an event and its record. Due to its ontological status, photography echoes an incarnational and Christological model, and cinema becomes a spiritual mediator between…
“It is a triumph of science to have, in some degree, described the electron, and preposterous to suggest is has been explained.” —Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things Faith integration is a task integral to the vocation of Christian education. It’s become a buzzword and identity marker: good Christian education means robust faith integration. Faith…
I double-checked the title; was “witness” singular or plural? With the answer—singular—the book’s thesis became crystal clear. Amy-Jill Levine invites each reader to be a witness, a witness to arguably one of the most monumental events in history, the death of Jesus of Nazareth. She lays bare each ancient witness’s actions and testimony, and encourages…
Responding to recent scholarship on writing pedagogy and hospitality, this essay offers a vision for a hospitable First-Year Writing (FYW) course that fits into the story of Scripture: one in which Christian hospitality lays a foundation for assignments, class conversations, student-teacher interactions, and assessment, among other practices. The essay includes reflections on my own attempts…
