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Margaret Diddams

Editor's Preface

Editor’s Preface

Being the editor of Christian Scholar’s Review is a great gig. I consider it a deep privilege to work with senior scholars who have published with us. Their wisdom and humility come through in pieces that are jargon-free and thought-provoking for other scholars and students alike. But I really love coming alongside junior faculty to…
Margaret Diddams
November 13, 2023
Blog

Introducing Christian Scholar’s Review 2023 Spring Issue

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…
Margaret Diddams
May 9, 2023
Editor's Preface

Editor’s Preface

The 20th-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 long gone. The fact that “evangelical” is now often understood within and without the Church as a political rather than theological marker has led to no little handwringing…
Margaret Diddams
May 8, 2023
Blog

Your invitation to publish with Christian Scholar’s Review

Over the past 52 years, Christian Scholar’s Review has published over 1,000 articles and is well on its way to reviewing 4,000 books. Published quarterly, each issue usually showcases 4–5 articles and 8–10 book reviews from the full range of academic fields. In our continual mission to further Christ-animated scholarship, we invite you to add…
Margaret Diddams
February 28, 2023
Blog

Introducing the Christian Scholar’s Review Winter Issue

Sometime in the next few weeks, it will be the third anniversary of the moment when each of us realized that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 would not remain isolated to Asia and a couple of cruise ships but was bearing down across the globe. On March 10th, 2020, I shrugged off The Atlantic article titled…
Margaret Diddams
February 15, 2023
Editor's Preface

Editor’s Preface

Sometime this winter will be the third anniversary of the moment when each of us realized that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 would not remain isolated to Asia and a couple of cruise ships but was bearing down across the globe. On March 10th, I shrugged off The Atlantic article by Yascha Mounk titled “Cancel Everything”…
Margaret Diddams
February 14, 2023
Blog

Joy (not Happiness) to the World

Tis the season for joy. In our best-loved Christmas hymns, the angels announce the birth of Jesus with glad tidings of great joy. In reply and echoing their joyous strains, we sing lustily and with good courage that God has sent joy to the world. Even the fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains cannot…
Margaret Diddams
December 15, 2022
BlogIntroduction

Introducing The Christian Scholar’s Review Fall Issue

It’s not surprising that a consistent finding across multiple subfields of psychology is that people are creatures of habit. We mostly go through our days with preferred rhythms of sleeping, eating, working, playing, and engaging with others. But habits and preferences shape more than daily big-ticket items. They also influence the nano-second processes by which…
Margaret Diddams
November 9, 2022
Editor's Preface

Editor’s Preface

It’s not surprising that we are creatures of habit, a consistent finding across multiple subfields of psychology. We mostly go through our days with preferred rhythms of sleeping, eating, working, playing, and engaging with others. But habits and preferences shape more than daily big-ticket items. They also influence the nanosecond processes by which we perceive…
Margaret Diddams
November 8, 2022
Blog

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