Resident Theologian
About the Blog
My latest: Luddite pedagogy, in the CHE
A link to my essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Three types of Christian higher ed
A mini-typology of different approaches to Christian higher education.
My latest: a plea to teach college students about God, in The Raised Hand
A link to my essay answering the question: “What does every university and college student need to learn?”
All together now: social media is bad for reading
A brief screed about what we all know to be true: social media is bad for reading.
So you want to get a PhD in theology
At long last, a primer on pursuing a PhD in theology—whether, how, why, where, and what it looks like. All in a breezy 5,000 words…
How do you spend your time in the office?
Counting hours and organizing time in the office as a professor.
My latest: no to AI in the pulpit
I’m in Christianity Today this morning arguing against any role for generative AI or ChatGPT in the pastoral tasks of preaching and teaching.
A.I. fallacies, academic edition
A dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor regarding A.I., ChatGPT, and the classroom.
Who are young Christians reading today?
What living authors are writing books that intellectually serious 15-25-year old American Christians are reading today? Are there any? Are they good? A failed attempt at an answer.
Ethics primer
There are two sets of fundamental distinctions in ethics. The first concerns the kind of ethics in view. The second concerns the difference between morality and other terms or concepts we are prone to confuse with morality.
The vanity of theologians
The love of God in Christ is the model of all good theological work. That is Barth's basic thesis: “If the object of theological knowledge is Jesus Christ and, in him, perfect love, then Agape alone can be the dominant and formative prototype and principle of theology.” Yet who among us would claim to consistently meet this standard? It is one thing to agree that teaching ought to be an act of self-emptying love on behalf of students, but quite another to teach that way.
What do I want for my students?
I teach theology to undergraduates. That means, on one hand, that I’m not teaching them a skill. Many professors pass on a set of concrete skills meant for a job or some other professional activity: how to interview a client; how to detect a speech impediment; how to parse a verb; how to mix solutions. Not me. That’s not what theology is about.
Christian ethics
This spring semester I’m piloting a course in theological ethics for upper-level students at ACU. Wednesday this week wrapped up our fourth week as well as part 1 of the course. To begin the work of synthesis I wrote up a series of ten theses on Christian ethics and distributed copies to the class. Here’s what I wrote.
A taxonomy of academic vocations
A couple weeks back I wrote more than 12,000 words on the experience of teaching a 4/4 load as a professor while also trying to publish (and, if possible, live an ordinary life). Consider this post a coda to that four-part series. Spending five years at Yale for my PhD was, in numberless ways, a blessing. But one of the few ways in which it was not was in its formation of my (and presumably others’) sense of what it means to inhabit the academy.
Deconstruction
My post on Thursday generated a lot of responses, many of which were positive. One mostly mild but nevertheless negative reaction was a defense of the concept of deconstruction, seeing in my post an unfair diminishment of what for many has proven to be both a necessary and a healthy process of growth in faith and repudiation of false or destructing teaching.
(Re)construction
There’s a lot of talk these days about deconstruction. I’m often asked how I approach deconstructing my students’ beliefs in the classroom; it’s typically a given not only that I do it but that I ought to do it, that it’s part of my job description. I do not deconstruct what my students come into my class believing. I don’t as a point of fact and I don’t on principle. Why?
Teaching a 4/4: freedom
This is the fourth and final post in a series of reflections on what it means to be a scholar in the academy with a 4/4 teaching load. The first discussed the allotment of one’s hours in a 4/4 load; the second compared apples and oranges in terms of institutional contexts (i.e., the material and structural differences between the Ivy League and teaching colleges, as well as between partnered parents and single persons without children); the third offered a series of tips and strategies for 4/4 profs who want to make, foster, and protect the time necessary for reading and writing. This fourth and last post is a companion to the third, discussing in broader terms some of the gifts and opportunities afforded by serving at a teaching-heavy university.
Teaching a 4/4: publishing
This post is the third in a short series on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load as a university professor and, conditions permitting, how to flourish while doing so. I’ve laid out the allotment of office and home hours given to work for the usual 4/4 prof (tl;dr: 50-60 hours, typically, just to prep, teach, grade, mentor, sponsor, serve on committees, and reply to emails); I’ve explained why there are inevitable tradeoffs involved, both at the personal and familial and at the institutional level. For many 4/4 teachers, scholarship is next to impossible without transgressing what ought to be a hard and fast division between work life and home life.
Teaching a 4/4: tradeoffs
In the last post I laid out what a typical work week looks like in terms of one’s allotment of hours when teaching a 4/4 load at a university. In this post I want to compare that to institutional contexts on the other end of the spectrum. Such a comparison shows rather straightforwardly what sort of tradeoffs are involved, from an institutional perspective, when professors are asked to teach more or fewer courses; in this case, tradeoffs concerning quantity and quality of publication.