Searching for Faith and Engineering: Revitalizing the Christian Engineering Archive

David B Dittenber, Jonathan Clayton

Keywords: Christian engineering, conference proceedings, digital repository, archive revitalization, topic modeling, AI-assisted analysis, BERTopic, research gaps

TL;DR: Updates to the Christian Engineering Conference archive of papers, with improved accessibility and some new analysis of topics and research gaps.

Abstract: In 2017, Steven VanderLeest provided a landmark overview of the Christian Engineering Educators Conference and Christian Engineering Conference proceedings in “Twenty-Five Years of Christian Engineering: A Literature Survey.” Since that time, the body of work has nearly doubled, with over 100 additional papers bringing the total archive to 212 publications (as of 2025). Although hosted on the Christian Engineering Society website, the papers have historically been difficult to access and search. To address this, a new initiative will make the archive publicly accessible through a modern, searchable digital platform. Alongside the accessibility initiative, an AI-assisted analysis extends VanderLeest’s survey by examining topic prevalence and examining remaining research gaps in Christian engineering. Most of the gaps identified by VanderLeest still remain underrepresented in the conference proceedings, and important new gaps, such as assessment of Christian formation in engineering education, were identified.

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Submission Number: 21