Jeffrey J. Selingo: What happens when this becomes a choice for student contribution? Yet other universities continue to follow in their footsteps. They all have child-like dreams that they’ll be the one to break through the mediocrity of mid-tier Division I. And their false ambitions are largely bankrolled by one group with little say in the matter and even fewer resources: students. In an investigation published this week, The Chronicle of Higher Educationand Huffington Post found that in just the past five years, public... Read more

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship. Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious. Sometime c. 1267 Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote a short piece De regno ad regem Cypri or On Kingship To The King of Cyprus. The quotes above come from book 1, chapter 11, paragraph 77 in fuller context and a slightly different translation (the Latin is also included at the... Read more

What does it mean to do history when it comes to Jesus? What is the historian doing? We might say there is a spectrum with at one end a radical reconstruction of what Jesus was really like and at the other end a kind of history that amounts to showing that the Gospels and the church after all got him and it right? One end is revisionism and the other end is apologetics. Where does NT Wright fit into this... Read more

Kris Bryant, Joe Maddon and now Jake Arrieta: In a close vote, Cubs‘ ace Jake Arrieta won the National League Cy Young award Wednesday night. Arrieta finished with 169 points and 17 first-place votes, while Dodgers starter Zack Greinke had 147 points and 10 first-place votes. Last year’s MVP and Cy Young winner, Clayton Kershaw, finished third with 101 points, earning three first-place votes. The Cubs also got the trifecta. They won the first two major awards announced this week by the Baseball Writers Association of America, with Kris Bryant a unanimous selection... Read more

Daniel Burke, at CNN: (at the link you can read the whole piece) The political response here has been far too much grandstanding rather that careful consideration on the basis of actual evidence nor has the grandstanding considered the already solid process of vetting. Two of the country’s largest and most influential religious groups, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Association of Evangelicals, are urging the United States not to halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees after... Read more

Are you a phubber? Kyle Jaeger: So you are finally seated at the table, ordered your food, and suddenly your phone buzzes. You got an email or someone mentioned you on Twitter, and you scroll through your phone, blissfully unaware of the world around you, including the person sitting across the table. You’ve just phubbed someone. Phubbing, or phone snubbing, is a distinctly modern dilemma. It happens often, but for partners who phub, it can be a bigger problem than you... Read more

This post is by Jonathan Storment in his series on the seven deadly sins, this one on gluttony. “Their god is their stomach.” –St. Paul When I was in college, I interned at a large church in Texas, and on one day I happened to be the only “minister” in the building.  A man had walked in needing some pastoral help, and the administrative assistant asked me to talk to him.  That was a mistake. The man was twice my... Read more

Revising language is inherent to revising our approach to the issues. So says John Stackhouse in Partners in Christ: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism. This will entail inclusive language when appropriate in the Bible’s translations into English. Language matters, and it matters immensely. It expresses and then shapes the world into which we speak. John begins by observing what happened with mid 20th Century feminism and language, and the big point must not be missed: language carries codes, the codes can be... Read more

The next chapter of Kyle Greenwood’s new book Scripture and Cosmology: Reading the Bible Between the Ancient World and Modern Science looks at Christian responses to the Copernican revolution.  Most of us today see no theological problem with the idea that the earth both orbits the sun and spins on its axis. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and finally Newton put together a convincing argument, beginning with observation and mathematics and ultimately the theory of gravity and mechanics whereby the less massive... Read more