Articles

Cultivating the Spirit is a book “...about the spiritual growth of college students” (1). This pithy description may lead some who work in faith-based institutions or in “religious” campus roles to add it quickly to their reading lists. After all, as the argument may go, students’ spiritual formation is central to what these folks prize.…

Simon LeVay’s book is the latest and most effective among the growing corpus of books and articles arguing for an exclusively biological explanation of sexual orientation. The broad and methodologically uneven array of evidence pointing to biological contributions to the origin of sexual orientation, heterosexual and homosexual, continues to amass, sprawling across diverse disciplinary areas…

Work is inescapable; individuals are either working or using the fruits of their (or another’s) labor. Christian theology has been surprisingly quiet concerning this pervasive subject of work. Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor is Ben Witherington’s contribution to the topic. Witherington, Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, begins…

As a young lad, Gerbert Aurillac entered the monastery, receiving a Church education. He served as a schoolmaster teaching future bishops, became a tutor and counselor to kings and emperors, advanced to abbot, then to archbishop, and eventually was elected Pope Sylvester II in 999 A.D. With a resume like that in the tenth century,…

Each generation has the obligation to interpret the past for itself with the best tools that it has available, even if choosing to accept most of the views which it has inherited. Similarly, each scholar has the obligation to seek to find what the optimum blending is of his or her most important personal values…

Besides lecturing at the University of Bordeaux, Jacques Ellul opened his own home for seekers of many backgrounds to explore their questions about Scripture, faith, power, and the relation of the kingdom of God to the social and political order. Among those at Ellul’s dining room table was Willem Vanderburg, who, being blind, sought Ellul’s…