Integrating faith with academics possesses significant benefits for students, because it connects major disciplines to students' personal values and goals, prepares students to be effective and faithful professionals in their discipline and vocation, and develops students' understanding of the nature of their discipline. However, to…

In an era in which part-time faculty are becoming a higher proportion of the teaching faculty on most campuses, this study addressed the question of whether student learning outcomes in religious education courses are significantly influenced by whether the instructor teaches in a full- or part-time capacity in the Department of Religion. We…

Civic and political engagement may encourage individuals to make positive societal contributions and thus act as responsible and productive citizens. A positive relationship between civic/political engagement and the extent of one's faith-based beliefs and behaviors has been the basis for a growing field of research (e.g., Becker & Dhingra, 2001;…

In recent years the secularization of religious universities has become a popular topic of research and scholarship. One facet of secularizing processes is the effect of the pursuit of national reputations by these institutions on their religious identity. A neglected aspect of this research is faculty perception. This study examines the issue as…

The secularization of higher education has created a complicated context for discourse about religion and spirituality in most public and some private universities. Yet the growing orientation toward spirituality and faith among undergraduates calls for a renewed openness to matters of beliefs and values in college classrooms, a topic addressed by…

As part of a larger investigation into the spiritual climate at one Lutheran college, we interviewed Protestant Christian students in order to compare their conceptualizations of spirituality, religion, and faith with biblical notions of those concepts. We found that the students' understandings of those concepts only loosely reflected general…

Although character formation has always been a central goal of education, efforts to promote character education in schools have, in the last century, always been hampered by an inability to adequately define character. We offer the concept of the flourishing life as the appropriate context for defining and developing character. This concept,…

This study provides a descriptive snapshot of high school students' home lives from their perspective as first-year college students as they attended a Bible college or Christian liberal arts college. The sample of over 2,300 surveys was collected annually for 14 years through selected freshmen courses, and the data reports on the frequencies of…

Persistence and retention have been studied extensively in higher education, but little research has been conducted on these areas in religiously affiliated institutions. The present study was designed to examine factors that influence the intentions of students to persist from their freshmen to sophomore year in private, religiously affiliated,…

There is paucity in the professional literature regarding the religious minority in religiously affiliated colleges and universities. This exploratory study analyzed one conservative private religiously affiliated university and the persistence rates of both the religious majority and religious minority. Crosstabs and chi-square analysis indicated…

We present the results of a qualitative, phenomenological research study that explored the spiritual dynamics of 13 overseas student teachers. Overall, participants in our sample described spiritual growth on two levels. First, they related that spiritual development often followed an inside-out pattern. In explaining this phenomenon, students…

Spiritual maturation processes of internalization and questing were assessed at a Christian university to determine their relationship to year in school and certain religious behaviors. This was a first step toward the development of a new model of Christian higher education that will intentionally facilitate spiritual maturation. A group of 179…

A strong anti-Christian bias exists in the modern American university. It has been documented by George Marsden in his 1994 book, "The Soul of the American University," and by a growing number of other scholars. The modern university response to the history of Bible translation movements provides another example of the anti-Christian bias in the…

The study reported in this paper reviewed the themes of the journal, "Theological Education," from the beginning of its publication in 1964 through 2006, as a means of gaining an historical perspective on the educational emphases that have shaped graduate theological education over the last 40 years. Theological education in the United States has…

Theological studies as a discipline committed to religious practice has come increasingly under fire from both adherents of dispassionate "religious studies" and partisans of ecclesial communities. A false solution is on offer that also emphasizes religious practices; this move, however, reinscribes the problem it seeks to solve because of its…