Blogs

My engineer son has a mantra: “Fix the problem.” As mantras go, it’s a pretty good one. Simple, memorable, intuitive, and to the point. The mantra refers to our tendency to go about addressing issues and problems by doing a...

Eric D. Barreto I love the holiday season, but I think I loved it more as a student than as a teacher. The Christmas season was usually a clear barrier, a distinct break. Finals were done. There was no more work to do. The weeks of Christmas and New Year’s...

Eric Barreto, Kate Blanchard and Roger Nam This holiday week, we thought we’d share some of our favorite places where we get stuff done: grading, class prep, research, administrative tasks, service projects, grants and even some occasional writing! Roger: Back home at George Fox University, I rarely do more than grab a book or journal in the...

Roger S. Nam It’s that time of year. Yes, it’s the season where professors often find themselves dealing with breaches of academic integrity. The explosion of online learning, alongside everyone’s massively expanded access to information, has further complicated this issue. Exhausted professors, I’ve got a special holiday gift for you:...

Elisabeth T. Vasko Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Theology Duquesne University In recent years, I have taught an upper-level Christology course in which we examine race, gender, and power. Sometimes my students register their dissatisfaction with reading Christology from the margins (James Cone, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Marcella Althaus-Reid) instead of the center (Anselm, Barth, von Balthasar, and Rahner). I can understand their frustration and discomfort. In the classroom, I make an effort to accept it and to take it seriously. I should also note that I teach at a university where the student population is mostly white. By and large,

Kate Blanchard Is anyone else out there taken by surprise, year after year, at how absurdly crazy the weeks feel between AAR and winter break? I’m not complaining – I just had a wonderful time with 10,000 religion nerds in sunny San Diego (which included a video shoot with my...

Robert C. Fennell, Th.D. Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology Atlantic School of Theology The most uncomfortable thing I ever say among professional colleagues is that when I was a child I was taught that we are all racist. In 1970s Western Canada, where I grew up, racism was real but often obscured by polite indifference and feigned ignorance. Yet our public school system urged us to see that within most of us there is an element that fears and reacts to difference. The terms for this dynamic were probably different then, but that was the heart of the...

When a school discovers a declining trend in enrollment it's time to huddle for some frantic strategic planning. If anxiety about the enrollment numbers is high enough some will want to talk about how the times they are a changin'...

Eric D. Barreto Ferguson is revelatory. “I wanted to comment on the tragic rift that we’re witnessing,” Bob Staake says about his cover for the December 8th issue of The New Yorker, arriving next week. “I lived in St. Louis for seventeen years before moving to Massachusetts, so watching the...

Leah Gunning Francis, Ph.D. Associate Dean for Contextual Education​ and Assistant Professor of Christian Education Eden Theological Seminary Now I get it. For the past three months, I couldn’t figure out why a jury would believe that an 18 year old unarmed man would charge – head first – toward a police officer who is shooting at him. Soon after Michael Brown was killed on August 9, several local officials intimated that Brown was charging at Officer Darren Wilson and left no other recourse but to kill him. Why would a person with no history of mental illness or of