Weekly Email: February 16, 2026

Weekly Email

Feb 16

We are in week three of the Spring 1 term. If you are still settling into a rhythm, you are not behind. This is often the week where the pace starts to feel more demanding.

Louisville is finally warming up. The snow is melting, and I am ready for spring.

In this week’s email:

Student Tip: Make Your Study Space Do Some of the Work
Program News: Dr. Shawn Wright’s Faculty Address on retrieval theology

Student Tip: Make Your Study Space Do Some of the Work

One of the main challenges of online theological education is that first part, the online part.

Most of your life already runs through a screen. When you start seminary, you are adding more intentional time on the computer, iPad, or even your phone. We also provide you with all your textbooks, digitally, through Logos, which can add even more screen time. All of this is great but it also creates friction. Focus is harder when the same devices carry everything else you do.

Think about what your screen has to hold in a single day. An email from someone in your congregation. A recipe while you make dinner. A show you watch to unwind. A YouTube video that helps you diagnose what is wrong with the sink. Then, without changing tools, that same screen becomes the place you read, watch lectures, participate in a LiveSync, take quizzes, write your paper, and submit assignments. Your brain is asked to treat one device as entertainment, urgency, ministry, and study, sometimes within the same hour.

That’s one reason you get tired faster than you expect. You are carrying family needs, ministry responsibilities, and the logistics of daily life. Then you sit down to study in an environment built to pull your attention in ten directions.

In the excellent book, The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul highlights research that puts attention and environment in the same sentence. She notes that “a twenty-minute walk in a park improved children’s concentration and impulse control as much as a dose of an ADHD drug like Ritalin.” She describes this as restoration, where “time spent outdoors gives us back what the built environment so relentlessly drains away.”

She also names a distinction that fits seminary life. There is “voluntary” attention and “passive” attention. Voluntary attention takes effort. It is what you use when you concentrate hard on a task or keep redirecting your mind as distractions press in. Passive attention is more effortless, and nature tends to evoke it through what researchers call “soft fascination.”

Most of your coursework depends on voluntary attention.

What is your plan for replenishing it?

Treat your physical environment as part of your study plan, especially for the parts of your coursework that require deep concentration. You probably cannot create one dedicated seminary space for every assignment. Life is too full for that. Still, you can build a few repeatable patterns that make focus more likely.

When you know you need to think deeply, choose a consistent place when you can. Reduce what competes for your eyes and hands. Clear the desk. Close the thirty Chrome tabs. Put your phone in another room for the length of a reading session. If possible, take a short walk outside before you start and leave the phone behind, because, as Annie Murphy Paul notes, using a smartphone while outside “substantially counteracts the attention enhancement effects” of being in nature.

Online learning will always require discipline, but it should not require you to study in a setting that keeps undermining the attention your coursework demands. Make your space do some of the work, so your mind can do the rest.

Program News: Faculty Address from Dr. Shawn Wright

Each semester, faculty and students have the privilege of attending a Faculty Address, a paper delivered by a faculty member invited by Dr. Mohler. This semester, Dr. Shawn Wright, Professor of Chruch History, delivered “The Reformation, Baptists, and Biblical Retrieval Theology.”

Dr. Wright focused on “retrieval theology,” a conversation that has been gaining attention among theologians, historians, and pastors. At its best, retrieval is a humble willingness to learn from the church’s past. But Dr. Wright argued that retrieval can become something more controlling, which he is seeing more frequently today, when voices from long ago begin to “set the agenda for the church’s beliefs and practices” today and start shaping what we think Scripture can and cannot mean.

He also named a trend he has seen up close: under the banner of retrieval, some are being tempted to abandon evangelical and Reformation Protestant convictions, with moves toward Anglicanism, and in some cases toward Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.

His central argument had two parts: (1) the biblically revealed gospel must sit in judgment over “aggressive” retrieval that leads people away from Reformation Protestantism, and (2) Baptists, as the “full flowering” of the Protestant Reformation, have a distinctive framework that helps guard the gospel and protect the church from that drift.

He then organized his address around six cautions:

Be humble and wise about the past. Old can be a gift, but old is not automatically right.
Do not overreact in a moment of cultural crisis by adopting unnecessary methods of interpretation.
Keep justification by faith alone and assurance of salvation central, even when certain historical systems feel compelling.
Keep a biblical view of the church central, especially when “church” gets used in ways that can smuggle authority away from Scripture.
Remember Baptists have historically been willing to break with tradition when Scripture demands it, particularly on the nature and membership of the local church.
Treat tradition as a teacher, not a judge. Scripture must remain the final authority over what we believe and how we live.

I encourage you to give it a listen.