This past year I enjoyed two extended visits with an old high school friend who had a profound spiritual influence on my life. This friend taught me tremendous lessons about intimacy, asking deep questions, listening, being aware of others’ needs, and forgiveness. She’s also female, and we dated at one point in high school. During…
Not far from our home in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is one of southern Ontario’s premier universities, McMaster, known internationally as a centre for advanced scientific and medical research. What few remember is that the university once had a connection with the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Québec, the only remnant of which is the presence…
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Hank Reichman and Karen Swallow Prior’s dialogue originally printed in the Academe Blog (an AAUP publication). We have reprinted a portion of it with permission. HR: In my Understanding Academic Freedom (p. 102-03), I discussed a professor’s refusal to write a letter of reference for a student seeking to study…
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Hank Reichman and Karen Swallow Prior’s dialogue originally printed in the Academe Blog (an AAUP publication). We have reprinted a portion of it with permission. Hank Reichman: Thank you for doing this, Karen. As I mentioned when we spoke, I am interested in your experiences in academia…
“[Curriculum] has been one of those places where we have told ourselves who we are.” —Frederick Rudolph One of the odd things about most forms of general education is how they fail to prepare students for life-long quests related to stewardship. What do I mean? Consider the fact that the University of North Carolina at…
“…they want to hang on to different parts of religion that they find to be beneficial to their lives—but strictly on their terms.” – Description of Emerging Adults When I met the older widow, I would be interviewing, I would not describe her externally as rugged. She was small and thin in stature and would…
While there are many ways to integrate faith into a discipline, some scholars argue that faith integration into any academic discipline should begin with the presuppositions which undergird that discipline. In some disciplines, presuppositions (and their impacts upon the discipline) are evident. For example, if I presuppose that there is a good and loving God…
In part 1 of this series, I attempted to respond to a student who asked, “Where is God in Ukraine?” My answer, in part, was to appeal to the oft-neglected doctrine of common grace where God saturates our rebellious world with good gifts in the form of medical discoveries, technology, morality, science, the arts, and…
Take up the cause of the fatherless.Isaiah 1:17 America currently has the largest percentage of children raised without two parents in the world (23% compared to 7% for the rest of the world). We also have the highest-ever number of children living without fathers in America (same web source). Our children and society will experience the…
As most any study of general education will tell you, students do not find general education engaging. As this study from the Harvard General Education Review Committee found, “Students report not taking their Gen Ed courses as seriously as other courses.” Yet, “Students wish more Gen Ed courses were worth taking seriously.” I think the problem is…
In 2005, with a two million dollar grant from the Lilly Endowment, Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland hosted their first Callings Conference. The purpose of the grant and conference was to delve deeply into the meaning and implications of vocation, particularly as defined from the point of view of faith both generically and in…
It may be hard to imagine, but before around 1800, almost every human product in the world was handmade. Every object was unique and wrought with time, sweat, and effort by artisans who had trained decades to master their craft. Most people, therefore, owned very few “artful” objects—maybe a few clothes and a few pictures—many…
Let’s start with the proposition that conversation about civility among evan-gelical Christians today has too much of the book of Proverbs and not enough of the book of Job. In contrast with the complex emotional world of Job (more on that later), the proverbists have a settled, centered comfortability with the world—so long as one…
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…
Popular sentiment may cast the American family as portrayed in the 1950s and early 1960s as a Platonic ideal. Children were precocious yet respectful of authority—enter Wally and Beaver Cleaver. Wives were the matriarchs of homes which were always in good order—enter June Cleaver. Husbands were dutiful providers who arrived home shortly after 5:00 p.m….
Tracy Fessenden’s new book, Culture and Redemption, maps the genealogy of what has been called “the Protestant consensus” and its affect on American literature from the Puritans to the modernists. In one sense this is an old and discredited story. For the past 25 years, the multicultural left has disputed that there has ever been…
In working with graduate school students who are earning school administration certification, I have found a theme that creates common ground for the diversity of candidates in my classes. Servant leadership is a steady driver that never sells the course short—regardless of the overarching topic. Since discovering in my doctoral work the rich literature in…
I became aware of The Shack by William Young (Windblown Media, 2007) the way I learn about many new books that I would probably never hear about otherwise: the father of one of my students sent me the novel via his daughter along with a request for an evaluation of its contents. It had not…
Having been struck by the title of the former book, I was reading it with a view to reviewing it when I came across the latter, and decided after a preliminary perusal that a review of both together would be more fruitful. As a teacher of the Classics (mostly in translation) at a Christian College,…
The contributions of Augustine and Thomas More to the development of the Western Intellectual Tradition certainly have been the subject of more than their fair share of scholarly evaluation. But usually such examinations focus on one or more of the sometimes slippery positions of the two authors, hidden often in allusion or late-career retractions, and…
