A prior version of this essay was delivered as the Carl F. H. Henry lecture and plenary address at the “Living Accountably” symposium on Faith and Culture at Baylor University in October 2021 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Christian Scholar’s Review. Joel Carpenter is a historian and former provost at Calvin College, and…
In the first episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Colleen M. Hanycz, President of Xavier University. Hanycz begins by discussing the opportunities that often go unappreciated or even unseen amidst the challenges presently defining the climate in higher education. While financial models remain a concern over which leaders must be vigilant, Hanycz contends that Jesuit colleges and universities such as Xavier as well as many other Church-related universities have an advantage when cultivating brave spaces for conversation and debate. Challenging matters should not be pushed aside but, when met with disciplined and charitable communication, opportunities for growth can take hold and flourish in such environments. Hanycz then discusses her background as a legal scholar and the discernment process that led her to serve as the president of an Ursuline institution in Brescia University College, a Christian Brothers institution in La Salle University, and now a Jesuit institution in Xavier. That background and her service as the first lay president at two of those three institutions afforded Hanycz with wisdom she shares with other individuals who may also consider appointments as the first lay presidents. Hanycz then closes by discussing her understanding of the academic vocation and the ways Xavier introduces its educators to the charisms defining the Jesuit expression of the academic vocation.
If you ask almost any student or professor what the purpose of the liberal arts is, they will likely not give you an explicitly theologically informed answer. Instead, they will likely discuss how “it fosters critical thinking,” or helps one “adopt different approaches to understanding,” or “trains one’s mind to be agile.” Christians are usually…
In the twentieth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Wendy Wang, the Director of Research for the Institute for Family Studies. Wang opens by discussing the research she and her colleagues conduct concerning the Success Sequence—a set of three steps that when followed in order (high school graduation, employment, and marriage) greatly increase a young person’s chance of flourishing in relation to a variety of measures. Wang offers details concerning her own vocation including her early research experience in China, coming to the United States to do doctoral work in sociology, and lessons she learned when working in a variety of roles for the Pew Research Center. She then shares her insights concerning the ways sociological data can be of benefit to policy makers seeking to improve the lives of families and children, occasions when we may ask too much of data, and occasions when we may ask too little of data. Wang then closes by exploring ways the data she and her colleagues collect can be of benefit to a variety of institutions including the Church, Church-related colleges and universities, and ways the Church and Church-related colleges and universities can work together when striving to improve the lives of families and children.
A Tale of Two Emersons In the little New England town where I grew up, two roads were named after Ralph Waldo Emerson—different roads sharing one name. Our split-level home sat on a half-acre plot by a meadow; while I lived on this quiet Emerson Road, there was another Emerson Road less than a mile…
At the heart of human existence is erotic desire. This erotic desire lurks behind the scenes in Marilynne Robinson’s Jack. In the fourth volume of Marilynne Robinson’s quartet that centers around Gilead, Iowa, the character Jack takes center stage. He has haunted the background in many of the subsequent novels, but in Jack, one encounters…
In this episode of the Saturdays at Seven Podcast, Todd Ream interviews Dr. Steven D. Mason, president of LeTourneau University. They discuss Steve’s journey to becoming an Old Testament scholar then provost and president at LeTourneau University, and also the uniqueness of LeTourneau being the Christian polytechnic university. Steve offers advice to younger colleagues discerning a call towards educational leadership, as well as how to start and manage STEM programs in Christian colleges and universities.
An infusion of vocational exploration within the undergraduate science curriculum could provide a path toward more effective healthcare and more significant scientific discoveries. students who pursue these careers often do so because they have a strong desire to help others; yet undergraduate science programs do not typically provide extensive training in communicating with others and…
The idea that persons are or contain a nonphysical soul that is capable of existing after the destruction of the human body is customarily called “dualism.” Over the course of two millennia, the Christian tradition has been solidly in the dualist camp. Most Christians have affirmed the existence of the soul, its survival of death…
In the late 1940s, budding American evangelist Bob Pierce visited Amoy, China, to preach the gospel at a girl’s school run by Dutch Reformed missionary Tena Hoelkeboer. Not knowing much about Chinese culture, Pierce told students to go home and tell their parents that they were going to become Christians. One of them actually did…
The love command is meant to encompass all areas of life for Christians, including Christian public engagement. Given cultural understandings of love, defining love carefully becomes a pressing task. Gorman’s cruciform definition of love helps by defining love negatively, as not seeking our own advantage or edification, and positively, as seeking the good, the advantage,…
Management research in the disciplines of Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management and Industrial / Organizational Psychology focuses on creating the optimum equ-librium between people and their work contexts. In this essay, Margaret Diddams and Denise Daniels use the Christian themes of creation, fall and redemption as a framework to analyze current management theories, and to…
Building on Miroslav Volf’s treatise Work in the Spirit, Donald W. Griesinger explores the theology of work as it pertains to the creative activities of Christian scholars, providing a theological grounding for those seeking greater integration in their lives by partnering with Christ in their scholarly work through prayer. Whether directed toward the church, the…
Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón: Hollywood’s “three amigos” have enjoyed recent financial and critical success and raised the profile of Mexican film-making in the process. In this paper, Scott DeVries finds that the cinematic aesthetics in films from these highly-regarded filmmakers represent the culmination of a long history of Mexican filmmaking, one…
As a young lad, Gerbert Aurillac entered the monastery, receiving a Church education. He served as a schoolmaster teaching future bishops, became a tutor and counselor to kings and emperors, advanced to abbot, then to archbishop, and eventually was elected Pope Sylvester II in 999 A.D. With a resume like that in the tenth century,…
Some colleagues and I recently undertook a national study of Christian faculty development programs at Christian colleges and universities. Although I will share a link to the academic publication containing the results when published, I want to share one of our conclusions. We realized in the end that Christian institutions need some fresh ideas in…
Amos Yong is J. Rodman Williams Professor of Theology at Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Evangelical higher education appears to be a booming business in the twenty-first century. Enrollment and expansion have persisted at much higher rates over the last two decades for schools affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges…
Amos Yong is J. Rodman Williams Professor of Theology at Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Evangelical higher education appears to be a booming business in the twenty-first century. Enrollment and expansion have persisted at much higher rates over the last two decades for schools affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges…
In this essay Daniel R. Allen reviews nuclear deterrence, the most crucial theoretic construct for nuclear weapons policy. A wide range of positions exists with respect to belief in the deterrent utility of nuclear weapons. The positions of deterrence optimists rely entirely on a presumption that human rationality undercuts the motive for nuclear weapon use….
Despite historical and recent scholarship that demonstrates the need to appeal to the affective dimension of students to enable appropriate behavior, Christian business education is dominated by cognitively focused “worldview integration.” In this essay Kenman Wong, Bruce Baker, and Randal Franz argue for reimagining business education as a formational enterprise in order to facilitate a…
