In an earlier blog post, I reported that public higher education enrollment shrank -4% between 2010 and 2019. In comparison, religious institutions only shrank -0.1%. What happens when we add the year 2020? We find that public university enrollment shrank by an astounding -8.4% between the fall of 2010 and 2020. In contrast, religious institutions,…
Remember all of that negative press about Christian Higher Education (CHE) declining? (see my posts on this topic here, here, and here). The just-released IPEDs Fall 2023 enrollment numbers should hopefully put a rest to that story for at least a year. The good news is that even though higher education as a whole faces…
(Choirs of Angels, Scivias I.6, https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/hildegard-von-bingen/scivias-i.6-the-choirs-of-angels/) Among medieval Catholic saints (think Catherine of Siena, Anthony of Padua or Joan of Arc), Hildegard of Bingen is one of the most palatable to modern tastes. She was not prone to shocking self-mortifications; she was not embroiled in muddy political disputes; and she has not been subjected to…
Perry Glanzer’s Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education is a sequel to his earlier 2022 book, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity. Dismantling offered an extended account, largely historical but occasionally theoretical, of how American academia, especially during the period from 1860–2020, steadily diminished human…
Perry Glanzer’s Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education is a sequel to his earlier 2022 book, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity. Dismantling offered an extended account, largely historical but occasionally theoretical, of how American academia, especially during the period from 1860–2020, steadily diminished human…
This post is a slightly edited version of a recent editorial published in the International Journal of Christianity and Education. Birds are excellent indicators of environmental health and ecosystem integrity…Results from long-term surveys, accounting for both increasing and declining species, reveal a net loss in total abundance of 2.9 billion [95% credible interval (CI) =…
Rick Langer is the Director of the Office of Faith and Learning at Biola University where he is also Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology and the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project. His publications have focused on applying theology to a wide variety of disciplines including business leadership, disability, suffering, bioethics, and most recently,…
Susan VanZanten is the Assistant Vice President for Mission and Spiritual Life and Consulting Dean for Christ College, the Honors College at Valparaiso University. She will be retiring in 2022. She has published many essays and books, including Joining the Mission: A Guide for (Mainly) New Faculty Members (Eerdmans, 2011). I have spent over 45…
This series is adapted from a chapter in Keith Loftin’s Rekindling an Old Light: The Virtue and Value of Christ-Shaped Liberal Arts Learning (High Bridge Books, 2022, published in conjunction with Moral Apologetics Press). Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” begins harmlessly enough—with townspeople from a rural community gathering in the picturesque public square on an idyllic…
I ended last year with some reflections on how to end a semester. Here I offer some reflections on how to begin one. They were provoked by a chance encounter with an introductory Spanish grammar text. It begins with these two sentences:“Grammar is one of the most difficult (read: boring!) parts of learning a language….
This semester seems to be ending in stages. We planned to send students home at Thanksgiving and teach the remainder of the semester online. Then a spike in COVID infections in the wider population and a state shutdown of schools and universities in response pulled us out of the classroom a week early. Some semesters…
This essay appeared first at Mere Orthodoxy: https://mereorthodoxy.com/market-made-scandal-evangelical-college/ Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind turned twenty-five last year. If we know a classic by its ability to speak across eras, one single event from this past summer is enough to assure everyone of the continuing tragic relevance of Noll’s book. In late July,…
I remember the dissonance I felt when I was invited to join a prayer meeting organized by Wheaton’s Politics and International Relations Department soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Masked and socially distanced, we gathered in a calm setting to pray for the people of Ukraine—huddled in basements and subways…
Differences of opinion have always been part of life. Spouses, family members, co-workers, neighbors, and church members have had spirited conversations about politics, theology, social issues, and even sports. This is especially true of students in our classes. In one study, college students were asked to keep a journal of how many disagreements with friends…
The Centers for Disease Control concluded in a recent study that approximately 61 million – one in four – Americans have a classified and diagnosed disability. The National Institute of Health (NIH) indicated in 2022 that the disability community represents more than 27% of the U.S. adult population, making that community the single largest minority…
This series is adapted from a chapter in Keith Loftin’s Rekindling an Old Light: The Virtue and Value of Christ-Shaped Liberal Arts Learning (High Bridge Books, 2022, published in conjunction with Moral Apologetics Press). Literature can give us ears to hear and sensitize our eyes to see goodness, truth, and beauty—in fact to effect union…
“Grab drinks? We don’t even share the same elevators!” For the past five years, in addition to being a professor of communication, I’ve served as co-director of Biola University’s Winsome Conviction Project that seeks to open lines of communication between people entrenched in ideological, political, or theological disagreements. When I was asked to respond to…
This series is adapted from a chapter in Keith Loftin’s Rekindling an Old Light: The Virtue and Value of Christ-Shaped Liberal Arts Learning (High Bridge Books, 2022, published in conjunction with Moral Apologetics Press). Why should Christians read literature from a broad array of writers and thinkers? As our last installment put it, “If literature…
Strangers and Scapegoats is the culmination of some 20 years of my learning to think sociologically while teaching undergraduate students to cultivate their own sociological imaginations. The concept of imagination—of perceiving old things in new ways—plays a central role in the book, and is, for me, key to addressing the perennial problem of the stranger….
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. This famous poem by Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Yeats captures the anxieties he felt as he scanned the social horizon of his day. The forces…
