Articles

The fullness of human community that Dante depicts in the final third of his Divine Comedy becomes more imaginable and compelling if we can see its playfulness and can, in turn, show the importance of play in our present communities, especially communities of learning. With help from James P. Carse’s distinction between finite and infinite…

Can game playing possibly be the ideal of existence? Philosopher Bernard Suits argues that it is, using a twist on the moral logic of Aesop’s fabled grasshopper. While many philosophers have weighed in on this question, none have done so with a Christian lens. In this article, we consider Suits’s body of work on the…

Understanding the role that exercise ought to play in a Christian’s vocation requires a clear understanding of what exercise is: Is it a form of work or of play? In this paper, I argue that although exercise evokes play in a number of ways, it is principally a form of work because it is extrinsically…

Comparatively studying the Hindu theologies of lila and the Christian theologies of play can provide a common ground for interreligious dialogue on divine delight, divine presence, and human flourishing. In doing so, Christians can aim to build a robust and embodied theology of play that affirms similarities and identifies differences with other faith traditions while…

Work and play are often seen as the antithesis of each other, and twentieth-century scholars of play often used their writings on play as an indictment of industrial work. However, a worldview that incorporates God’s Kingdom in the here and now as redeemed but not yet restored provides room for play in all realms of…

Shame and guilt are important concepts within Christian theology. In much of the literature, however, these two concepts are lumped together, offering little if any distinction between them. By contrast, evidence-based psychological research on the topics of shame and guilt has flourished over the past 30 years, offering a careful and important distinction between shame…

This article proposes that Transformative Learning Theory (TLT), particularly in light of recent advances in cognitive linguistics, is a fruitful means of teaching and interpreting tensions within Scripture. One of the key distinctions of TLT is that deep learning involves a crucial change in the learner, often induced by a crisis or a “disorienting dilemma”…

Some Christian students in the sciences may encounter apparent tensions at the interface of science and religion, resulting in struggle, doubt, or loss of faith. While the content of these tensions is often addressed in the classroom, the experiential process of struggle is not often addressed. The goal of this paper is to explore two…