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Review and Response

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Teaching: A Review

The title of this book parallels George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship,George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). and the emphasis on Christian teaching is a welcome supplement to Marsden’s focus on Christian scholarship. Indeed, Marsden writes the foreword. This book is a significant complement to…
February 14, 2023
Review and Response

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Teaching: A Response to Elmer John Thiessen

Since Elmer John Thiessen is one of the foremost philosophical thinkers in Christian education, we are grateful for his review. Furthermore, considering Thiessen’s contributions and his extensive teaching experience in pluralistic contexts we are similarly grateful for his claim that we “make a significant contribution to providing a more nuanced answer to the question as…
February 14, 2023
Review Essays

Signs Against Violence: A Review Essay

In his recent book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, journalist Jonathan Rauch makes a compelling case that our shared sense of reality is a product of a worldwide network of those committed to a set of principles and practices he sets out to articulate.Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of…
February 14, 2023
Extended Review

Don’t Look Up? Four Views on Heaven: An Extended Review

“Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” opens John S. Feinberg in Four Views on Heaven (23). Trying to circumvent, downplay, or ignore our mortality, as well as demurring to talk candidly about death, has bedeviled humanity from time immemorial, satirized by the likes of Monty Python’s classic “Parrot Sketch” and…
February 14, 2023
Book ReviewReviews

Nurturing Faith: A Practical Theology for Educating Christians

This book is an admirable attempt to chart a “road map” for the discipleship and educational mission of the global, twenty-first century church. The authors identify their work as a “practical” theology because it seeks to inform the church’s practice through “self-conscious examination” of current practices (9). By “faith” the authors mean “a knowledge-based, conviction-established,…
February 14, 2023
Book ReviewReviews

Playing as Others: Theology and Ethical Responsibility in Video Games

Since their inception, video games have often been viewed as trivial or unworthy of significant theological study. However, Benjamin Chicka argues that this posture is a mistake: video games represent powerful cultural artifacts that possess the potential for tremendous theological depth, and they provide us with new vistas of ethical possibilities. Whereas most serious theological…
February 14, 2023
BlogIntroduction

Introducing The Christian Scholar’s Review Fall Issue

It’s not surprising that a consistent finding across multiple subfields of psychology is that people are creatures of habit. We mostly go through our days with preferred rhythms of sleeping, eating, working, playing, and engaging with others. But habits and preferences shape more than daily big-ticket items. They also influence the nano-second processes by which…
November 9, 2022
Article

Not Fundamentalist, not Conservative, and not Liberal: The Fundamentals and the Mainstream of American Evangelicalism

Everyone knows that American Protestantism generally divided into fundamentalist and liberal camps in the 1920s. And many people know that fundamentalism derives from The Fundamentals, early-twentieth-century tracts that reduced the rich doctrinal heritage of Christianity down to five points of do-or-die orthodoxy. Neither of these putative facts, however, is true. This paper shows that The…
November 8, 2022
Article

A Christian Framework for Expertise and Biases in Face Processing: Reconciling Modern Research in Face Perception within a Creation, Fall, Redemption Narrative

Adults demonstrate exquisite sensitivity to the characteristics of the human face; indeed, it is one of the few visual categories for which we exhibit near-universal expertise. However, despite this expertise, our recognition abilities for the faces of individuals of different racial backgrounds and ages are significantly impaired, which can negatively affect our interactions with others.…
November 8, 2022