Remembering 2025
Recapping a busy year, plus some long overdue reading recommendations
Hey, folks. As the alternative rock/metal band Staind proclaimed in 2001, “It’s Been Awhile.”
Indeed it has. In fact, it’s been two months—two months!—since my last Uneasy Citizenship entry. And with 2025 almost in the books, I thought it was a good time to reach out and remind you that this page still exists.
That’s not enough, you say? Okay, fine. In that case, I’ll recap a busy 2025, plus give some reading recommendations to conclude the year.
Highlights from 2025
The year began with my beloved Oregon Ducks getting smoked in the Rose Bowl against eventual national champion Ohio State. Since then, it’s been a pretty excellent year.
At work, I taught great students, worked with excellent colleagues, and contributed to the life of a vibrant university. At home, Caitlyn and I watched our kids grow (Henry is excelling at percussion and cross country! Margaret is loving ballet! James is a basketball and baseball aficionado!). And most importantly, we finally relented to Margaret’s pressure campaign and welcomed a dog into our family. Readers, meet Jack.
Some other high points:
Helping to supervise a student trip to Selma, Alabama (I wrote about that here)
Vacationing in Charleston, South Carolina with Caitlyn and two good friends (I also wrote about that here)
Taking a baseball road trip with my youngest son to celebrate him turning 10
Visiting Oxford and London with Caitlyn (the former for work, the latter for fun)
Hosting a seminar on Alexis de Tocqueville for JBU students
Not losing my final fantasy football league (admittedly a low bar, but it is what it is)
Spending lots of quality time with friends, in living rooms, at dinner tables, and around fire pits
Of course, the positives of this year cannot overlook the year’s challenges. As a political scientist I am concerned about the state of our national political system and institutions, rooted in an ever-expanding vision of the presidency, an increasingly impotent (or at least disinterested) Congress, and a judicial branch seemingly trying to keep the peace—and, in doing so, pleasing few and infuriating many. And public opinion, so often rooted in partisanship yet detached from ideology, does not seem equipped or inclined to hold elected officials sufficiently to account, defaulting more and more to being driven by negative partisanship and even epistemological polarization.
Moreover, as a Christian I am aware of the difficulties to a faith-informed political posture, made even greater by the aforementioned issues. But this is precisely why it’s important for Christians to think, discern, and pray about how to approach political questions with the same intentionality we approach other important questions in our lives. A faithful political engagement will almost certainly not yield a complete overhaul of our political environment. But if we take seriously our charge to be stewards of the world in which we find ourselves, we have to start somewhere.
As always, I’m hopeful Uneasy Citizenship occasionally offers some encouragement in this regard. Stay tuned for more information about some exciting upcoming events in 2026, including Center for Faith and Flourishing lectures from Ryan Burge and John Wilsey.
Merry Christmas, all.
Most Read Entries of 2025
You asked for it (or maybe you didn’t). Anyway, here are the most read Uneasy Citizenship entries from the past year.
Reading Recommendations
Fidelity and Fearless Engagement: Charting the Future of Christian Colleges (Christian Scholars Review)
Geneva College’s Melinda Stephens’ review essay identifies shared themes and questions from three recent books on Christian higher education. Of particular importance for all three books, she writes, is their concern with encouraging a flourishing Christian university:
Each of these authors presents a different vision for a flourishing Christian higher education institution. For Langer and Rae, a college flourishes when all members of the academic community, driven by mission, focus on mission fidelity and model an educational experience characterized by cultural participation and Christian formation for students (106). Hawthorne believes that flourishing will manifest when a Christian university lives fearlessly. To become fearless, he emphasizes the institution’s need to center on the student experience, shift from fear-based culture-war activity, model transformational outcomes for students, and understand more deeply how the university differs from the church (69). In the epilogue of his book, Ostrander reflects on institutional flourishing, suggesting that the key to institutional flourishing is “not one single thing, but a variety of features united by the common theme of providing students, faculty, and staff with the ability to be truly known” (172). He argues that the core value of Christian higher education institutions lies in “their ability to provide students not just with what students think they’re looking for—preparation for a successful career—but with what we as Christians know they’re really looking for: authentic community” (170). Ostrander describes a flourishing institution as one that possesses faculty committed to engaging with and mentoring students, dedicated to student formation. Such institutions are focused on cultivating healthy communities rather than focusing solely on achievement and outward success and, thus, are growing in faithfulness to their calling (178).
The visions of flourishing institutions offered by Ostrander, Hawthorne, and Langer and Rae highlight the need to balance unwavering commitment to foundational identity with courageous engagement in the modern world.
Smartphones and the New Tribalism (Public Discourse)
Thomas Howes explains how smartphones and social media have contributed to and exacerbated today’s political and cultural divides:
With social media … deep engagement in the many worlds of others is often replaced by memes and clips, slogans and knockdowns, and a strong tendency toward exclusive engagement with a highly particularized tribe. Ideas once dismissed as radical gradually come to seem normal as our little tribes embrace them. Little cults form and, as we see in the younger generations, there exist soldiers of online tribes walking among us with almost no allegiance to our real-life communities. The internet has allowed misfits to find each other, which is simultaneously the best and worst thing about it.
Pastors Aren’t Politicians (Christianity Today)
Anglican priest Cole Hartin explains why he’s increasingly ignoring politics in thinking about his responsibilities in leading his church. There is, however, a sizeable caveat to his thinking (highlighted below):
Pastors are sometimes advised to “preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” a quote (probably spuriously) attributed to the theologian Karl Barth. I think this is bad advice. For most Christians in America most of the time, what’s happening in Washington, DC, is not terribly relevant to the daily challenges of living in faith, hope, and love. For most of us, far from the halls of power, politics is but a specter that haunts real life.
But the Bible is real life. The local church is real life. The people with whom I speak and visit and pray, they are real life.
That tangible connection determines when I do have to pay attention to politics: when it begins to harm people under my care. And then my role is to help them as best I can. Sure, this involves telling the truth. But more often it involves listening, praying, and helping in practical ways.
We Were Jesus Freaks (First Things)
Trevin Wax reflects on the role that Christian contemporary music (CCM, to the initiated) played in shaping his faith as a teenager and young adult. Though article’s title alludes to DC Talk’s most important album, Wax contrasts that band’s hard style with the softer and (at least initially) more contemplative music of Jars of Clay:
In 1995, DC Talk reinvented themselves with Jesus Freak, which blended rock and rap (“So Help Me God,” “Like It, Love It, Need It”), pop (“Between You and Me”), and even folk (“In the Light” and “What If I Stumble?”). The mix somehow gelled—an “in-your-face” combination of rock and rap, raging guitars and soaring harmonies hellbent on keeping young people from hell. The album’s title track was a deliberate throwback to the origins of CCM, the California revival in the 1970s, but “Jesus Freak” (clearly influenced by Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) had a compelling, power-chord driven enthusiasm impossible to ignore. Thousands of teenagers embraced this anthem, proudly proclaiming the freakiness of their faith in the eyes of the secular world.
In contrast to DC Talk, Jars of Clay’s first album was more brooding—the lyrics more ambiguous, the music more acoustic, employing a wide range of instruments and strings in a folk-rock collection that explored grace and love, sin and sadness. There were songs you could jam to (“Flood,” which played over the credits of the film Hard Rain with Morgan Freeman), but the majority were simple, reflective expressions of faith (“Like a Child” and “Love Song for a Savior”). At the time, youth group kids typically identified with either DC Talk or Jars of Clay, each band’s style reflecting different teenage personalities. I was more of a Jars guy, enthralled by the musical arrangements, always mulling over the meaning of the lyrics, drawn to the introspection of songs like “Worlds Apart” as opposed to the guitar bluster of DC Talk, though plenty of young people enjoyed both bands (as did I).