Category: Education
An Open Letter to College Freshmen
Dear College Freshmen, Congratulations on getting into the university of your dreams. And if it’s not of your dreams, congratulations anyway. You have the opportunity before you to join the 10% of people in the world who have a college degree. That...
Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Modern Literature?
Back during the halcyon days of the Bush administration (ha!), I read a piece in Touchstone which bemoaned the dearth of Evangelical modern literature. Evangelical professor David T. Williams surveyed the fiction produced by his tradition over the past century...
The Quick and the Dead
This is the final reflection in a series on questioning and education in response to Matt’s new book. Cate MacDonald led things off, David J. Gilbert continued it, and Jonathan Mueller closes things down here. Like them, Jonathan teaches in...
Short-term Missions Trips and Cultural Institutions
In a recent piece for Christianity Today, Doug Banister described one of the problems with short-term mission trips: I spent many years taking mission trips to Tulcea, Romania. We shared the gospel, cared for orphans, and started a medical clinic. It...
The Surprising Similarities Between First Dates and Bad Textbooks
This is the second reflection in a series on questioning and education in response to Matt’s new book. Cate MacDonald led things off and David J. Gilbert, who teaches in The Academy at Houston Baptist University, continues it here. Way...
A Reading Guide for 2013
In the Andersonian fashion of asking questions, I submit that one of our urgent questions is this: What are the possibilities of the vita contemplativa in the late modern world? In Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche lamented, “Because there...
Summer Reading for College Graduates
It’s late May, which means that across the world, twentysomething college students are graduating or preparing to graduate: departing campuses and communities that have shaped them deeply and venturing off into the wide open spaces of adulthood in a way...
Peter Enns and the Crisis of Evangelical Higher Education
At the theology conferences in the UK which I occasionally attend, the sizeable cohort of American evangelical expats, postragraduates scattered amongst the universities of (mostly) northern Britain, can usually be found gathered in tight-knit coteries, deep in cynical though light-hearted...
On Teaching Lambs
I lie awake at night, overwhelmed with the fear that I am participating in the greatest and most dangerous hubris, to think that I should teach. When I took my job at Houston Baptist University I knew, of course, that...
Day One from Oxford: A View from The Kilns
When I first named “Mere Orthodoxy,” I started from a very simple question: which writers had lived and written in such a way that I wanted to emulate? The answer was as immediate as the question was simple: Chesterton and...