The Blackboard

Planting and Tending the Lost Seeds of Learning

Donnelly’s scope of transformation may seem like an impossible undertaking, yet even if it is not possible for everyone to achieve the level of faith integration suggested here, anyone can still benefit by choosing particular areas for improvement.

Fact’s Two Faces: On the Masking of Children at School

Life is ambiguous, murky, rife with situations that elude dogma’s capture. When the seas get rough, however, our tolerance of this is one of the first things hucked overboard. For example: have we felt into what it’s like to be a five-year-old walking into school in the morning?

Craft and Theology: The Renaissance

It almost feels heretical to say that at the center of our religion, indeed our existence, is a God that can be wounded and broken, but this is precisely the Christian claim. We live in a world that can be degraded, and God entered that very degradation in Christ. So might there be a connection between what we do in the world and this world's wounded God?

The Classroom as Sanctified Space: Human Formation away from the Screen

For the sake of human formation and flourishing, it is essential to carve out sanctified spaces of peace and refuge away from the mesmerizing pull of screens.

The Absurdity of Teaching

As we approach the new academic year, we, like Sisyphus, are condemned to roll the rock up the hill only for it to roll back down. However, this does not have to be a meaningless task – we can escape the absurdity of our condition. We give ourselves meaning by following either the dogmatist, the activist, or the healer.

Res Idiotica

South Bend, IN My students are know-nothings.  They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent.  But their minds are largely empty,...

What I Learned in Grad School

Temperamentally and vocationally, I was in the wrong place. Yet I don’t regret a single day I spent there—not only because I met my wife, but because I learned to relish a simple, quiet way of living that many around us seem anxious to exceed.

A.I. Doesn’t Cause Cheating. Fear Does.

Front Royal, VA. How do you catch a cheater? This is the question that is plaguing the minds of college and high school faculty...

Dissecting Hospitality

The virtue of hospitality has enjoyed something of a minor renaissance. Over the last few decades, theologians and ethicists have sought to make a...

Apocalypse Now: ChatGTP and the End of Education

The intrusion of AI-generated content into the university sphere is a strange kind of judgement, even an old-style apocalypse, whose real gift is neither its productive power nor the opportunity it provides to declare one’s Luddite bona fides. ChatGPT is, both more simply and more profoundly, a revelation.