This week I critiqued a Fox News article about “top Christian colleges and universities,” celebrated the space God gives us in prayer, and recommended a book on “the courageous middle.” Elsewhere:
• Last Saturday I mentioned an insider critique of National Public Radio by an NPR editor who has since been suspended and then resigned. Here’s a critique of the original critique, by NPR host
. It’s a good reminder of why journalism and “viewpoint diversity” are challenging.• Nadya Williams added an important point to my critique of the Fox article on top Christian colleges: “We live in an age obsessed with quantitative data and research… But… qualitative research yields more interesting data that can be much more telling than sheer numbers on some arbitrary scale.”
• Some religious universities are “not only leaning into artificial intelligence in the classroom” but “embracing AI as a tool for critical thinking at institutions focused on morality and the whole person in addition to academics.”
• More promising (to my mind), three Wheaton professors looked back to the Chicago Declaration of Social Concern (1973) to think well about Christian higher ed in 2024.
• Speaking of Chicago(land)… one of the newer Substack writers that I follow is
, a biblical scholar at Northern Seminary whose newest series offers advice to potential seminarians.• My heart goes out to the people of Calvin University, a great school being sued by its former president.
• One of the hardest sentences for anyone — Christians included — to say: “I don’t know.”
• This week I again celebrated the ways that Christian colleges occupy “borderlands.” I meant it metaphorically, but a literal border is also a site for Christian learning.
• For any Christian historians reading this… we’ve already got a great schedule shaping up for the October 2024 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. But we’ll continue to accept paper and panel proposals through May 15th.
• If you want to dive into the history of Christianity, one church historian had ten primary sources to recommend as “starter books.”
• While Christians often think of themselves as “people of the book,” it’s important to remember that most followers of Jesus have been illiterate — indeed, that the Bible itself was written in times of limited literacy.
• And those who have been able to read the Bible often did so with the assistance (and under the subtle influence) of “paratextual devices.”
• The AND Campaign’s Justin Giboney, a former college athlete and current Little League coach, explained why “sports can be a helpful servant for Christians—and an awful master.”
• Finally, the surprise release of a Taylor Swift double-album is big news to some of us… and provides more fodder for philosophers.