Margaret Diddams

As I write this post, our sailboat is tied up in a small public marina in British Columbia, twenty-five nautical miles north of the city of Vancouver, on a sunny weekday morning. However, just outside the harbor, twenty-knot winds with forty-knot gusts are whipping up three-foot whitecaps, and even in the harbor, our boat is…

The standard format for each issue of Christian Scholar’s Review over the past fifty years has typically begun with three or four peer-reviewed articles, followed by book reviews and occasionally article-length extended reviews. In this issue, we are altering our traditional format to begin with a book review forum curated by our new book review…

While Colorado is known for having 50 mountains that exceed 14,000 feet, my home state of Washington boasts its own mountainous claims, with nearly 100 reaching mile-high peaks. Yet one among them stands out. At 14,409 feet and 60 miles southeast of Seattle, Mt. Rainier is simply known as “the mountain.” In a city that…

A friend asked me not so long ago, “Where can we find hope in such uncertain times?” Many of us have been asking this reasonable and pressing question for much of the past five years. As Christians, we can easily recite a couple of the 140 Bible verses that, in various different stories and admonitions,…

When we receive a manuscript that looks promising for publication, I often ask its authors to keep two things in mind as they work on revisions. First, I ask them to make it clear why people should care about their topic, reminding them that most of their readers will likely be outside their field. However,…

I love the Olympics. I have been transfixed by them for over fifty years, starting with the 1972 Munich games, where Olga Korbut catapulted women’s gymnastics to a demanding athletic sport, and a very photogenic Mark Spitz shattered seven world records to go along with the seven gold medals he won in his seven swimming events. My…

Ten years ago, on June 5th, Aaron Ybarra went hunting. A 27-year-old with a history of mental illness, Ybarra decided to target Seattle Pacific University, a convenient setting a few miles south of the suburban home where he lived with his parents. On a beautiful Thursday afternoon during the last week of the quarter, as…

In October 2023, twenty-five theological ethicists, business ethicists, economists, and philosophers gathered in New Orleans to explore the importance of virtue in business ethics for Christians. The symposium was hosted by Loyola’s Center for Ethics and Economic Justice and funded by generous support from the Kern Foundation and Seattle Pacific University’s Center for Faithful Business.…

In this cultural moment in higher education, when everything appears to be up for grabs, perhaps it’s time to think more deeply about how grades might hamper holistic student development. Although education scholars have been sounding concerns about the value of grades for almost 100 years, I personally never gave the need for them much…

Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, a diverse group of more than fifty North American-based evangelical academics, publishers, and church leaders—both young mavericks and more senior statesmen—gathered at the Downtown Chicago YMCA to discuss the need for greater evangelical social concern. The impetus for the conference had occurred earlier in the spring at the first Calvin…

As a multidisciplinary journal, we strive to ensure that all of our pieces would interest a general academic audience. This doesn’t mean they are dummied down in any sense of that phrase. The articles stand on their own as academic pieces. In multiple indexes such as Google Scholar and Researchgate, I can see that our…

Back in 2001, I got a dog for my fortieth birthday. Balancing my professorship, a husband who traveled too much for his job, and a home with four children attending four different schools, I wanted a creature in my life who asked for little more than food, water, a good brush down, and a walk.…

With today's blog, I’m pleased to introduce the spring issue of Christian Scholar’s Review. We open the issue with a symposium addressing the issue of Christian political engagement. The twentieth-century fundamentalist questions, pre-dating Carl F. H. Henry and the later rise of the Moral Majority, of whether Christians should participate in the political sphere are…