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Branding Your Scholarly Passion on Social Media: A Three-Week Course Through...
With a student who took a hybrid in-person/on-line class I taught. How many scholars have told me that social media takes away from their work? Certainly more than those who have told me social media...
View ArticleVirtue and Vulnerability
Is Viktor Frankl’s life a story of resilience or vulnerability? It’s both, I think. Frankl survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to an influential career as a psychiatrist and writer. Yet,...
View ArticleCritical Realist Research Methods
What might critical realist research methods look like? At the 2015 Annual Meetings of the International Association of Critical Realism, I discussed some common problems I saw in syllabi and textbooks...
View ArticleWhy Positive Sociology Needs Tragic Sociology
How might positive psychology and positive sociology benefit from greater engagement with theological views of suffering? At a the 2015 meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA), I...
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Teaching Sociology at Princeton Theological Seminary
I’ve received my dream job. I’ve enthusiastically accepted the calling to use my expertise in sociology to the serve the students and faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS). I will start my...
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Seeking the Sacred?
Original post published April 1, 2016 on Black, White, & Gray. How do people seek the sacred? For a recent project, I interviewed 26 young adults in 10 different states about hardships they had...
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Critical Realism and Sociological Research Methods Webinar April 28th
On April 28, 2016, at 12 Noon EDT, I’ll be giving a free webinar on Critical Realism and Sociological Research Methods. Every good researcher is to some extent a good theoretician. Yet, typical...
View ArticleBooks on Critical Realism and Sociological Research Methods
As part of an upcoming webinar on Critical Realism and Sociological Research Methods that I’m leading on April 28, 2016 at 12 noon, I will be posting a series of blogs with some resources on how...
View ArticleCritical Realism in Action: 5 Great Articles Using Critical Realism in Social...
In preparation for my upcoming webinar on CR & Research Methods on April 28, 2016, at 12 noon EDT, I wrote a recent blog post about my five favorite books on showing why critical realism matters...
View ArticleIncorporating Critical Realism into Research Methods Classes
This is the third of three blogs in which I list 23 readings we could use to teach about the methodological implications of CR. Don’t forget to register for my webinar in CR & Research Methods on...
View Article10 Things I Have Learned from Teaching about Intentional Communities
1. A working definition of intentional community is: “Groupings of people who have left their own milieu to live with others under the same roof, and work from a new vision of human beings and their...
View ArticleWhat do you Teach? Sociology and Theology
Whenever I tell people I teach sociology and theology, I get a puzzled look. For people who know little about either field, I often get questions like: What is that exactly? What kinds of courses do...
View ArticleBeing a Contemplative Academic
I’m a contemplative academic. But what exactly does that mean? I have spent nearly two and a half decades in a university setting, either as a student or a professor. But it was only recently that I...
View ArticleDoing a Whole Lot of Nothing at a Monastery
“I won’t get anything done this weekend!”, I lamented to a friend over lunch the day before I took a group of students to Regina Laudis, a women’s Benedictine monastery, for the weekend. Then I listed...
View ArticleWhat Led me to Luigi Guissani
Introductory Remarks: The 2018 Luigi Giussani Series on Faith and Modernity Tonight we gather as a way of recalling the life and writings of Luigi Giussani. Fr. Luigi Giussani is well-known as the...
View ArticleNewman’s Vision of Liberal Arts Education
As a freshman at Yale, I had no ideas how to pick what courses to take. Yale’s famous Blue Book (the course listings) was literally full of thousands of options for me. There were no required courses...
View ArticleLiving the Question: Highlights from Scala’s 2018 Summer Seminar
“This seminar blew my mind.” “This seminar is genius.” Those were just some of the comments from the 14 students from all over the US who came together for 12 days to read 26 authors and hundreds of...
View ArticleBeing Human in the Modern World: Why Personalism Matters for Education and...
This piece originally appeared in Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, NJ, and has been reposted with permission. “If there is a philosophical task for which...
View ArticleFighting the Burnout Culture: How Personalist Philosophers and Benedictine...
This piece originally appeared in Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, NJ, and has been reposted with permission. What are the ends of education? How do...
View ArticleActon Institute 2018 Annual Dinner Alumna Convocation
Delivered on October 17, 2018 in Grand Rapids, Michigan The most important lessons I’ve learned about the importance of virtue to sustain free societies came from my many trips to my mother’s homeland...
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