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Margaret Diddams

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A Few Words in Favor of Reticence

Reticence is not much of western virtue. In Shakespeare's King Lear, the words of Edgar, son of the Earl of Gloucester, to “speak as we feel, not what we ought to say” illustrate the tragic cost of withholding one’s authentic thoughts and feelings toward others and perhaps even more tragically from oneself. After all, pulling…
Margaret Diddams
October 20, 2022
Blog

COVID: Me, Not Me, and Freedom in Christ.

On June 1st, while driving to meet family for brunch on a beautiful Sunday morning, tiredness overcame me. I told my husband I would drop him off, return home to take a little nap, and pick him up a couple of hours later. Once home, I made a beeline to the couch. I didn’t read…
Margaret Diddams
August 19, 2022
Blog

Introducing Christian Scholar’s Review’s Summer Themed Issue: Conviction, Civility, and Christian Witness

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. This famous poem by Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Yeats captures the anxieties he felt as he scanned the social horizon of his day. The forces…
Margaret Diddams, Rick Langer, Tim Muehlhoff and Robert H. Woods, Jr.
August 8, 2022
Blog

Languishing? Take Courage, Take Heart

The most-read article in The New York Times in 2021 was not about COVID, not about January 6th, not about the trial of Derek Chauvin, nor about NASA’s helicopter, Ingenuity, flying above the surface of Mars. It was by social psychologist Adam Grant who wrote back in April about languishing,Adam Grant, “There’s a name for…
Margaret Diddams
March 21, 2022
Editor's Preface

Editor’s Preface

Nobel prize-winning social psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos TverskyDaniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Choices, Values and Frames,” American Psychologist 39.4 (1984): 341-350. discovered a quirk in the perceived value of everyday items. Referred to as the bias toward “loss aversion,” they found that people tend to see more monetary value in things they…
Margaret Diddams
February 28, 2022
Blog

The Christian Scholar’s Review Winter 2022 Issue

With today’s blog, I am pleased to introduce the Winter issue of Christian Scholar’s Review. As I write this, there’s not much winter left in the Pacific Northwest with the crocuses in bloom and hummingbirds fliting across my study’s window. But as has been the case with so much of our cattywampus pandemic lives, the…
Margaret Diddams
February 28, 2022
Blog

It’s a Matter of Trust

What makes for good leadership? There isn’t a straightforward answer. The study and practice of leadership is a bit like Baskin-Robbins with thirty-one or more different flavors. There is valid data to show that effective leaders lead from the front with charismatic personalities. Other, equally valid, studies show that effective leaders function more in the…
Margaret Diddams
December 1, 2021
Editor's Preface

Editor’s Preface

With this issue we celebrate fifty years of God’s faithfulness to Christian Scholar’s Review. As with any anniversary we look to our past, consider the current status of Christian scholarship, and look forward with thanksgiving and some trepidation to the next fifty years. We have also given ourselves a bit of a gift, sprucing up…
Margaret Diddams
October 27, 2021
Blog

The Peril of “Illumination”

When is illumination, as light shined upon knowledge, no more than sound and fury—signifying nothing? Are there times when illumination is even perilous? I have been on a tear this summer reading books whose copyrights have expired, allowing me to download them for free. I recently read the 1896 novel, “The Damnation of Theron Ware;…
Margaret Diddams
September 9, 2021
Blog

Filling the Well When the Water Runs Dry

The lackluster Department of Labor April jobs report took just about everyone by surprise: the US economy showed a net increase of only 266,000 nonfarm jobs. With the country opening up after the winter’s lockdowns, some estimates projected that the total would be closer to a million new jobs.  Did this mean that the economy…
Margaret Diddams
July 7, 2021
Blog

A Future Full of Living in the Past Progressive(ly)

I recently opened my daily New York Times morning e-mail to these sentences from David Leonhardt: “Good morning. The pandemic may now be in permanent retreat in the U.S.” A good morning indeed. With the changes in the CDC guidelines suggesting easing restrictions on mask wearing outside, and then inside, for those who are fully…
Margaret Diddams
June 2, 2021
Blog

There Is No Wisdom in Looking It Up

We have all heard this from our students: “Why do I have to know when I can just look it up?” Today’s undergraduate students have come of age seeing their phones as an extension of themselves; their sense of self too often shaped in part by their browsing history and the responses to their own…
Margaret Diddams
April 27, 2021
Preface

Editor’s Preface

Having announced my retirement in 2019 after twenty years as a faculty member and administrator at Seattle Pacific University followed by four years as the Provost of Wheaton College, I had assumed that my academic career in Christian higher education had drawn to a close with my retirement in August 2020. However, three weeks before…
Margaret Diddams
April 15, 2021
Blog

Delighted to be a Dilettante

About a decade ago, a first-generation freshman came into my office for her first academic advising meeting. As we talked through her set of classes, I asked her in what she thought she would like to major. With downcast eyes and quiet voice, she told me that she had no idea. In that instant, I…
Margaret Diddams
March 30, 2021
Blog

The Rationality of Irrationality

Back in 1996, my husband and I had a heated debate over the former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s use of the term “irrational exuberance” to explain the bull stock market at that time. He agreed with Greenspan that irrationality was the only explanation for some of the ridiculously inflated price to earnings ratios,…
Margaret Diddams
February 3, 2021
Blog

A Call to Character

During this election season, pundits, pastors, as well as politicians have spoken often about the character of our nation. Last month in The Atlantic, David Brooks wrote about cultivating moral character in the midst of collapsing trust, and more recently Pastor John Piper wrote about the importance of leaders as influencers, observing that the calling…
Margaret Diddams
November 13, 2020