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Spirituality, Social Justice, and Language Learning

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…
April 15, 2009
Reviews

John Calvin and the Natural World

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…
April 15, 2009
Review Essays

Conflicting Views from the Banks of the Little Bighorn: A Modest Proposal for a Christian Approach to Indian Studies

I. Introduction Although mountains reaching over 13,000 feet beckon in the distance, little to nothing is immediately present that can halt the advance of a wind that punishes all who dare to cross this isolated though immortalized swath of land. An occasional scrub tree is all that stands in defiance of this wind that serves…
April 15, 2009
Article

A Question of Power: A Political Scientist Responds to AIDS in Africa

In this article, Amy S. Patterson investigates how political power shapes the AIDS pandemic in Africa. Because Christians in the West often lack knowledge about how political power increases vulnerability to HIV infection and affects policy responses to the disease, the work analyzes the uneven impact of HIV/AIDS on countries, communities, and population groups. It…
January 15, 2009
Article

Teaching Vocation and (Other) Unsafe Scientific Principles

How might Christians in the natural sciences articulate their aims and motivations? Finding bearings in the themes of faith and calling, Matthew Walhout argues that traditional answers to this question tend to bind Christian thinking too strongly to objectivist rationality. He reiterates a concern registered historically in the context of Renaissance humanism, namely that Christian…
January 15, 2009
Reviews

The Evolution Controversy: A Survey of Competing Theories

In the spring of 2008, the movie Expelled hit the theaters. Ben Stein, famous for his dead-pan act in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, interviewed scientists who claimed that their disagreement with the Neo-Darwinian party line jeopardized their careers and made them the targets of discrimination. While some of the claims of this movie are almost…
January 15, 2009
Reviews

A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (Tertullian, the 3rd century B.C.E.) is really the basic question addressed by this new book, which is part of the Liturgical Studies Series of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Calvin Stapert’s small book undertakes an enormous task, sketching a brief history of documents that refer to…
January 15, 2009
Reviews

Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue

Robert B. Stewart is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he holds the Greer-Heard Chair of Faith and Culture. It is there that he also directs the annual Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum, which is a five-year pilot program that provides evangelical and non-evangelical scholars opportunities to come together to…
January 15, 2009