Articles

The relationship between anthropologists and missionaries is a particularly intriguing one. It is full of the stuff that is fertile ground for academic engagement, not least because of a certain overlap of interests coupled with long-standing tension. The collection of articles found in Anthropology’s Debt to Missionaries, written predominantly by anthropologists, provides a valuable, though…

My prolific bookseller friend has insisted that Beyond Homelessness is one of the most important books of 2008.Byron Borger, review of Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement, by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/review/beyond_homelessness_christian/ (accessed November 2008). I find it hard to disagree. Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh assert that…

A few decades back, Walker Percy told the parable of a Martian who, upon visiting our planet, is overwhelmed by how much humans talk. After asking about all the gabbing, the alien receives a cross-disciplinary bibliography on linguistics and speech physiology and information theory. “’But wait,’ says the Martian, ‘What about the actual event of…

This collection of essays explores the intersection of language learning, social justice and spirituality. Discussions of the relation of spirituality to language teaching have opened up only recently, sometimes with alarm and acrimony by secular critics of Christians in the field of teaching English as a second language. David Smith has authored or coauthored four…

A recent article in The Economist, “Evolution: Unfinished Business”, reflecting on the development and dissemination of Darwin’s theory on the 200th anniversary of his birth, considered the results of a poll on the public’s acceptance of the theory of evolution within several Western countries. In the US, the bar graph showed that roughly 40% of…

Some critics have claimed that James Baldwin was the last African American writer for whom the church was a necessary subject and context. Such a claim attempts, I think, to point to the changes that had been ongoing within African American culture since the turn of the century. At least as early as W.E.B. Du…