background on Going Back To School

Anthony of Padua opened every class he taught with the phrase, “Of what value is learning that does not turn to love?”

I recently visited a missions school at a large church in Waco, Texas, and decided to try a similar test in a class-sized proportion. “Tell me,” I said to the group, “what is the gospel?” A young lady...

What happens in the brain when we are afraid? Remember the little red metal square on the school-room wall with a piece of glass that reads, “Break in case of fire”? Just as the school has a fire alar...

One of the reasons I love a good invitation is that I get tired of being told what to do. As the very responsible oldest daughter of a pastor and someone who entered vocational ministry at a young age...

I have been moved to a different course of action, however, inspired largely by my daily exposure to college students in a great university during the course of a preaching and teaching ministry that ...

In their beginnings, many universities were connected to the church and religious orders, and a sabbatical was considered a time to experiment, learn anew, or pray and meditate. That understanding, un...

A New York Times story reports on the positive impact school recess has on academic performance. Here’s how it begins: “The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take t...

We swim in an ocean of feedback. Each year in the United States alone, every schoolchild will be handed back as many as 300 assignments, papers, and tests. Millions of kids will be assessed as they tr...

In an old joke, people refer to seminary as cemetery. Attending one does feel like that at times, so the last thing I expected to discover in a dingy classroom in the basement of a Pasadena seminary s...

Nick believed his purpose was to speak to audiences, to become a motivational speaker, yet he had no experience, no resources, and no invitations. He decided to begin calling schools and offering to s...

I…vividly remember one of my teachers telling the story of three young boys whose route to school went alongside a high wall. Every day as the boys walked to school, they wondered what was on the othe...

There is a deep longing in every human heart to return to our ancestral home. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sing about this in their song “Woodstock”: “We got to get ourselves back to the garden.” T...

Several years ago I was conducting a seminar in the interpretation of Scripture in a theological seminary…Our topic that day was Jesus’ parables…One of the priests, Tony Byrnne, was a Jesuit missionar...

A lesson often learned the hard way in each of our spiritual journeys is mistaking goodwill for vocation. Sometimes we feel deeply about an experience we have, whether it be on a mission trip or even ...

Steve Sample has been described as the greatest university president of his generation. For nineteen years, by his capable leadership, Sample led the University of Southern California to new heights o...

The Texas-based pastor Matt Chandler spent a decade working with teenagers, and during that time, he realized how a specific change takes place between sixth graders and ninth graders. As Chandler say...

Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak arrested my heart a few years back. It begins with a poem by William Stafford, “Ask Me”, that begs this question: “Some time when the river is ice ask me mista...

Let us begin with a question. Do you really know how to enjoy the world? Do you know how to enjoy yourself? One of the greatest parables in the New Testament has to do with the search for enjoyment an...

Have you ever heard of "Stein’s Law"? Named after University of Virginia economics professor Herbert Stein, it states: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Do you...

Within the Christian community this leads to a prominence of teaching on the will of God and how to know it. Russ Johnston draws upon his own wide experience to remark how this continues to be one of ...

Read any study on human satisfaction and you will see the paramount role of relationships with others. And yet, so many of us readily exchange friendship and community for success and achievement, onl...

Sociologist Ann Swidler has written persuasively about the difference between “settled” and “unsettled” times. Settled times consist of “traditions and common sense; [within which we] refine and reinf...

As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining t...

The twenties are a time when one asks, What will I do with my life? What is it that I really want in exchange for my life’s labors? Most denied that the key desire of life was for material wealth; t...

Where do you turn for marriage advice when you aren’t religious? This is becoming an ever-increasing question as western cultures become more and more secular. One option is to turn to the London-base...

In his book, Falling Upward, Franciscan priest Richard Rohr describes the need for helpful discussion and direction on the themes that arise in the second-half of life, which, as he notes, presents a ...

In ancient Judaism, discipleship was taken very seriously. It was taken so seriously that eager disciples would ty to follow their rabbi (teacher) everywhere they went. Why? Because they wanted to see...

In an attempt to engage in critical thinking, scholars suggest asking whether our opinions are true by simply asking if the opposite could be true. This practice (I’m not joking) is named after on an ...

I was teaching an English class in a high-rise apartment complex full of low-income families in Minneapolis—mostly immigrant and refugees from East Africa. The tenants’ association paid for me to come...

Culture, like the air we breathe, is a powerful force that cannot be seen but felt. In this short excerpt, the British writer George Orwell describes in The Road to Wigan Pier how his education includ...