For readers outside North America, the concept of "honors education" may be confusing (since the word honours features in British and Commonwealth degree titles) or obscure (bringing to mind associations with aristocratic privilege or elitist competition). But in the United States the development of honors programs in colleges, and later honors colleges within universities, has been an important and growing trend of the last fifty years. Intended to recruit students of high intellectual aptitude, to serve their special needs, and to raise the academic profile of the host institution, honors programs have proliferated from a handful in the 1940s to more than 600, as catalogued in the most recent edition of "Peterson's Guide to Honors Programs and Colleges." Even though the phrase "honors education" may have a peculiarly North American ring, the issues raised for those who teach highly talented university students are the same for Christian educators around the world, and very little has been published on the topic. This article aims to identify some of the issues that are particularly relevant to Christian higher education for "honors" students, to explore how different theological traditions offer different pedagogical resources for teaching the gifted, and to describe some successful paradigms for cultivating hearts and minds toward service in the kingdom of God. (Contains 5 notes.)