Christian Experience & the Philosophy of Higher Education
I did not come to Christian faith through a classroom. I came through pews, funerals, foxholes of the soul, and the slow discipline of chaplaincy in the U.S. Army Reserve. That order matters. It taught me early that formation precedes information, and any philosophy of higher education that inverts the two produces graduates who know more than they can bear.
Higher education, on my read, is not the transfer of expertise. It is the cultivation of a mind that can hold weight. The Christian tradition has never confused a full head with a formed soul, and the modern university's forgetting of that distinction is precisely why it now graduates specialists who cannot say what a human being is for.
My Christian experience makes me suspicious of education as consumption. Students are not clients. Knowledge is not merchandise. A syllabus is not a menu. The classroom is a covenant space, and every teacher who enters it is answerable — not only to the institution and the accreditor, but to the God who gave the student the mind we are helping to shape. That is a heavy word. I mean it to be heavy.
The Teacher's Influence
The teacher's job is not to make disciples of the teacher. Paul got the order right. Every syllable of that sentence matters. The teacher points past herself. If she does not, she has become the subject of her own course, and her students are learning idolatry with footnotes.
I have watched the guru model wreck good departments and worse pastors. The professor becomes a brand, the classroom becomes an audience, and the students become the applause. Influence is real, and the temptation to hoard it is older than the academy. My chaplaincy trains me the other way. You do not own the soldier. You serve the soldier. You do not exist to grow your following. You exist to make the soldier fit for a battle you will not fight for them.
So the influence I want to have is the influence of a witness. I want students to leave my classroom with sharper instruments, more honest questions, and a lower tolerance for their own nonsense. I want them to argue with me and win — because that means the argument is real. I want them to catch me in an error and say so — because that means I taught them to see. And I want them, ten years out, to remember not my opinions but the habits of attention I asked them to build.
If they remember me and not the discipline, I have failed. If they remember the discipline and forget me, I have done my job.
Integrating Christian Faith with the Subject Matter
My subject areas sit at the intersection of Christian ethics, spiritual formation, and the digital age — including artificial intelligence and the question of what human formation even means when the tools of formation now imitate us. This is not a niche. This is the frontier, and the Church is arriving late.
Integration, done right, is not a devotion at the start of class. It is not a Bible verse taped to the syllabus. Colossians 1:17 does not say Christ decorates all things. It says in him all things hold together. That is a metaphysical claim before it is a homiletical one, and it changes what integration means.
In practice: when I teach ethics, I do not teach Christian ethics as one voice at the table alongside utilitarianism and Kant. I teach the Christian tradition as the tradition making a claim about what a human being is, and I make every other framework answer that question or admit it cannot. When I teach AI and formation, I name the counterfeit — what I call compliance discipleship, the machine-shaped habit of alignment without allegiance, obedience without conviction — and I ask the student to see that the tools we are building reveal what we have already accepted about ourselves. When I teach practical theology, I refuse the pastoral-industrial complex that treats souls like a pipeline and metrics like fruit.
That is what integration looks like in a real classroom. It is not louder. It is deeper. The Bible is not a supplement; it is the light by which the rest of the reading is read. And students — even skeptical ones, especially skeptical ones — respect a professor who actually believes what he teaches more than they respect one who performs neutrality he does not feel.
The Weapon in the Sheath
I came up through Charlottesville, Howard Law, Liberty Divinity, and Emory's Candler School of Theology, and I have taught, chaplained, litigated, and built businesses in between. Every one of those seasons taught me the same lesson from a different angle: knowledge without formation is a weapon looking for a target. The Christian teacher's calling is to keep the weapon in the sheath long enough for the student to become the kind of person who can be trusted with it.
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