Weekly Email: June 29, 2026
We are now in Week 5 of the Summer term. This week I want to share something I learned editing photos and what it has to do with how easily we can deceive ourselves in our studies. I also have some exciting news about two new master's degrees at Boyce College that you may want to pass along to a friend.
In this email:
- Student Tip: Avoiding Deception in Your Studies
- Program News: Two New Master's Degrees at Boyce College
Student Tip: Avoiding Deception in Your Studies
When I first got into photography, I quickly realized how much my own eyes deceived me when I edited. I'd finish a set of edits at night feeling good about them, then look at the same photo the next morning and wonder why I hated the colors. After some research, I understood why. Editing a photo by feel, just going off what your eyes tell you, will deceive you.
Our eyes constantly adjust and renormalize whatever they're looking at. It's an incredible God-given design, a way of seeing the world consistently no matter the lighting. But when you sit down to edit a photo, that same gift starts working against you.
Say you're working on a photo that's a little too warm, with a yellowish-orange tint to it. The longer you stare at it, the more your brain accepts that warmth as neutral. So you cool it down, add some blue to balance it, and it looks right. Then you open the photo somewhere else and it's obviously, completely wrong.
The surroundings fool you too. The very same photo looks brighter against a black background and darker against a white one, even though nothing in the image has changed.
The fix is to stop trusting your eyes and look at something objective. In editing software these are called scopes. The histogram shows you how brightness is distributed across the photo, from the shadows on the left to the highlights on the right. The waveform shows you that same exposure laid out across the frame, so you can see how even it is. There's even a vectorscope that shows you the colors themselves, how saturated and balanced they are.
So you're no longer editing on feel, where it's easy to oversaturate the colors, push the contrast too far, or drift too orange or too blue. The scopes keep you honest.
The same thing happens in your studies. Your brain normalizes whatever you do over and over, including the things that quietly work against you.
Reading with your phone next to you is the easy example. You sit down for thirty minutes, glance at your phone here and there, and get up feeling like you read. But you've normalized the distraction, so you never feel how much it slowed you down. Put the phone in another room and read for thirty minutes straight. You'll be surprised how much more you get through.
Your writing works the same way. Read your own paper enough times and you start to believe it's clearer than it is, your eyes sliding right past mistakes you've stopped noticing. An outside reader resets that. Send your paper to the Writing Center and you get honest feedback, with fresh eyes, before you ever turn it in.
So as you go through your week, pay attention to what you've quietly normalized in your studies, the things that feel completely normal only because you've done them so long. Bring in some outside perspective, or in the case of distraction, take the phone away and set a new baseline. Either way, you get a truer read on how your studies are actually going.
This matters because your seminary work is stacked on top of everything else in life, your job, your family, your church, and all the distractions that come with them. Anything that helps you study more efficiently helps you work more consistently. And we're never chasing efficiency for its own sake. The goal is to steward your time well, so you can focus when it's time to focus and be fully present in every other part of your life.
So give that some thought this week. And I'd love to hear from you, is there something you've normalized that could use a more objective set of eyes? Sometimes, just like those scopes on a photo, the most helpful thing is simply a truer way to see what's already there.
Program News: Two New Master's Degrees at Boyce College
Boyce College just announced two new master's degrees, a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership and a Master of Arts in Classical Christian Education. Both are 30 credit hours, completely online and asynchronous, and can be finished in about a year.
I'm excited about these. They give people a way to advance in the workplace from the same solid Christian foundation Boyce is known for. That's part of why they sit under the college rather than the seminary: they're built to apply broadly across the marketplace, not only in a ministry context. Organizational Leadership is for those leading in business, nonprofits, and the community. Classical Christian Education is for those teaching in the growing world of classical Christian schools.
Applications are open now. Boyce College alumni receive a 10% tuition discount, which comes out to around $1,200 across the 30-hour program.
Someone may already be coming to mind, a friend, a coworker, someone at your church. Would you pass this along? You can read the full announcement or point them to boycecollege.com/masters. You can also view the video from Dr. Mohler here.
Quick Reference of Upcoming Term Dates:
- Current Week: Summer, Week 5 (June 29-July 6)
- Fall 1 Term Begins: August 3, 2026
- Fall 2 Term Begins: October 5, 2026
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