One of our department’s PhD students committed suicide late in 2018. Earlier that week, two undergraduate students had taken their lives. I rarely talked to the grad student even though he had been here for at least six years. He always seemed pleasant, and he was easy to spot for he wore a turban, being […]
You want me to pray with my students? In my office? Isn’t that asking for trouble? These and many other questions came to mind when I was encouraged to begin praying with my students. As a professor and administrator at a public university, I often think about the legal challenges related to living out my […]
I don’t know when the shift happened. I started my position as a tenure-accruing assistant professor with the pressure to prove myself. To show that I belonged. To show that I was not an affirmative action hire. After all, I had already published three peer-reviewed manuscripts from my master’s thesis before I entered the doctoral […]
I have been involved with Faculty Commons, Cru’s faculty ministry, for many years as a professor. Now that I have retired and joined Faculty Commons staff, I have discovered a ministry idea that allows the Christian faculty at my university to be a blessing to many other professors, as well as providing opportunities to interact […]
Several years ago, I was invited to join a group of Cru students from my campus, on what would be my first mission trip. I was their faculty representative, but I wasn’t prepared for that invitation–an invitation that came from our local Cru director and ended with: “I would love for you to pray about […]
Going to class early provides me with a wide range of opportunities to get to know my students as individuals with needs and desires, as opposed to just a sea of nameless faces. In addition, the students learn about me and what I do outside of class. I talk about football, NASCAR races, my Sunday […]
When I retired from teaching exercise science in the Kinesiology Department at the University of Wisconsin-EC, one of my goals was to turn my attention from physical things that I had studied and taught for many years to spiritual issues that I knew were more important in the big picture. Dave Johnson, Faculty Commons staff […]
It is a challenge to start conversations about faith with non-believers. It seems we often have so little in common. How do we begin to talk about Jesus with colleagues and students who differ from us in almost all categories–religiously, politically, socially, or morally? What if they are simply agnostic or just plain apathetic about […]
During my 24+ years (almost a quarter of a century!) at Texas A&M University (TAMU), I continued to use office posters, identify myself to my classes as a follower of Jesus, and treat my students as the special people that God created them to be. But over time, God gave me many new, creative ways […]
I’ve found that the subject matter of psychology affords natural opportunities to discuss my faith in Christ. At first, I had never considered that there might be connections or even contradictions between the two because I had always kept faith in one box of my brain and psychology in another. But when I applied to […]
