In recent years, the social sciences have faced a “replication crisis,” raising questions about how we conduct, report, and interpret research findings. A large-scale replication project in 2015 tried to recreate nearly 100 studies from recent publications and found only about 40% of attempts successfully replicated. This finding sent shock waves through the psychology community….
James Davison Hunter wants us to know things look bad because they are bad and have been so for quite some time: the United States is not only facing stark polarizations in our time, but, he argues, these polarizations are a result of the longstanding fault lines within our foundations for democracy. In this long-awaited…
In a passage sure to strike many moderns as charmingly quaint, Augustine confesses genuine puzzlement upon observing one of Saint Ambrose’s reading habits: “When he read, his eyes travelled across the page and his heart sought into the sense, but voice and tongue were silent. Almost unable to believe his eyes, Augustine gropes for possible…
The faculty summer. You all know what I mean when I say that it’s a complicated phenomenon, right? I mean, think about it; we just completed a crazy spring semester (after getting through a crazy fall semester). As the end of the semester approaches, we start to slow down with the committees and other university…
As I write this post, our sailboat is tied up in a small public marina in British Columbia, twenty-five nautical miles north of the city of Vancouver, on a sunny weekday morning. However, just outside the harbor, twenty-knot winds with forty-knot gusts are whipping up three-foot whitecaps, and even in the harbor, our boat is…
This July marks the one hundredth anniversary of the most famous event in the history of American religion and science, the trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a rural Tennessee high school. The rookie teacher was convicted of violating a new state law prohibiting public schools “to teach any theory that denies the…
In the forty-fourth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Eric F. Spina, President of the University of Dayton. Spina begins by sharing details concerning how he and his colleagues are reinvesting in the city of Dayton, including the development of a business incubator and a multiuse community. He goes on to articulate how such investments not only make wise sense for the recruitment and retention of faculty, staff, and students, but more importantly how such efforts express the Catholic and Marianist commitments to the common good. Spina then discusses his own formation as an educator and the influence offered by his parents, teachers and coaches at Buffalo’s Canisius High School, and his graduate advisor at Princeton University. Spina originally had no interests in an administrative career as he was vocationally content to serve his students and his discipline as an engineer during his 28-year career at Syracuse University. The decisions he made to serve as a department chair, a dean, and provost were a result of leadership he became persuaded he could offer. While Spina also initially had no interest in pursuing service as the president at Dayton, he became compelled by the possibility due to the university’s mission and meeting the people who seek to bring that mission to life each day. He then offers details concerning the conclusion of Dayton’s current campaign as well as his aspirations for the university in the years to come. Spina concludes by explaining how he understands the qualities and characteristics that inform the academic vocation as expressed at Dayton.
As a professor who researches the role of artificial intelligence in education, I’ve spent the past few years asking hard questions about how AI will shape teaching and learning. Will students learn less if they rely too heavily on generative tools like ChatGPT or Claude? How do we maintain academic integrity without becoming surveillance officers…
Recently, there’s been even more press than usual about AI proliferation and its associated risks. The hype has been driven, in part, by the now infamous Ross Douthat interview with Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, in which Kokotajlo suggests that AI could take over civilization—and “then kill all the humans”—by 2027….
We live in an age where information is instantly accessible, with near-limitless knowledge available at our fingertips. At no point in history has so much information been within immediate reach. This unprecedented access has sparked important conversations about the relevance of traditional educational structures—and even the role of higher education itself. In 2022, Inside Higher…
If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is: something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero…
In his work Wayfaring: A Christian Approach to Mental Health Care, Warren Kinghorn explores a non-mechanistic approach to the understanding and treatment of mental illness, framing this view within a Thomistic account that explores transformation in the midst of suffering rather than human symptoms as problems to be fixed. Advancing his argument within a psychiatric…
The primary claims of the first edition of George Marsden’s book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, remain as salient and persuasive as they were thirty years ago: First, Christian academics may—I will argue should—be doing their scholarship from a Christian point of view (more shortly on what that might mean in practice), and second,…
When George Marsden published The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship in 1997, I was a couple years away from completing my PhD in English. I was a young Christian studying at a state university in exactly the kind of academic environment hostile to religious faith that Marsden addresses in his book. Having been educated entirely…
The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship became an instant classic when it was released by Oxford University Press in 1997, but I must admit that I always disliked the title. While it is an effective attention-grabber, the text itself is far more nuanced and polite than the title presages. Additionally, the word “outrageous” conveys neither…
In his work Wayfaring: A Christian Approach to Mental Health Care, Warren Kinghorn explores a non-mechanistic approach to the understanding and treatment of mental illness, framing this view within a Thomistic account that explores transformation in the midst of suffering rather than human symptoms as problems to be fixed. Advancing his argument within a psychiatric…
The primary claims of the first edition of George Marsden’s book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, remain as salient and persuasive as they were thirty years ago: First, Christian academics may—I will argue should—be doing their scholarship from a Christian point of view (more shortly on what that might mean in practice), and second,…
When George Marsden published The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship in 1997, I was a couple years away from completing my PhD in English. I was a young Christian studying at a state university in exactly the kind of academic environment hostile to religious faith that Marsden addresses in his book. Having been educated entirely…
The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship became an instant classic when it was released by Oxford University Press in 1997, but I must admit that I always disliked the title. While it is an effective attention-grabber, the text itself is far more nuanced and polite than the title presages. Additionally, the word “outrageous” conveys neither…
In the thirty-fourth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Jonathan J. Sanford, Professor of Philosophy and President of the University of Dallas. Sanford opens by sharing about the University of Dallas’s history which includes support from the Archdiocese of Dallas as well as support from several religious orders. That combination of support converges at Dallas in a charism that fosters a unique academic culture as well as an array of opportunities for spiritual formation. For example, Sanford discuses how that charism is present in the two-year core curriculum which all Dallas students encounter as well as opportunities Dallas students have to experience Mass with the Dominicans at St. Albert the Great Priory and Novitiate and the Cistercians at Our Lady of Dallas Abbey. Sanford then discusses his own journey of vocational discernment that included his formation as a philosopher. Shortly after his appointment to the faculty at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Sanford was appointed chair of the philosophy department which fostered his commitment to serve as an educational leader. Sanford’s initial appointment as an educational leader at Dallas was as a dean but led to his appointment as provost and now as president. Regardless, Sanford continues to teach each semester, believing that doing so allows him to maintain an experientially grounded understanding of the educational experiences that define the Dallas community. Sanford then closes by detailing the commitments that define the academic vocation as exercised at Dallas as well as intellectual and moral virtues that make such an exercise possible.
