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Samford University’s Josh Reeves Appointed Associate Co-Editor for Theology

The editors, associate editors, and institutional representatives who serve Christian Scholar’s Review are pleased to appoint Josh Reeves as the next Associate Co-Editor for Theology.  Reeves currently serves as the Director of Samford University’s Center for Science and Religion and joins Karin Stetina (Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Biola University), who serves as…
October 23, 2025
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Faithful Love for Our Non-Christian Neighbor: Should We Exclude Non-Christians from Key Student Leader Positions?

Christian universities and colleges that accept non-Christian students, which is the majority of Christian universities, always face the challenge of loving our non-Christian neighbors sacrificially while remaining faithful to our love for God (and by extension the institution’s Christian mission). The reason why doing both is so difficult stems from a common human reality: We…
October 16, 2025
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The Antisemitism Epidemic: A Christian Response

On June 1, 2025, 45-year-old Mohammed Sabry Soliman yelled "Free Palestine!" and tossed Molotov cocktails at Jewish participants at an event meant to draw attention to the plight of Israeli hostages. The cocktails burned eight of the participants, with one 82-year-old victim eventually dying. Two months later, on August 27th, a 70-year-old Jewish woman shopping…
October 10, 2025
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Is Holiness a Virtue?

One of the primary things we learn about God in the Bible is that he is holy (Lev. 11:44-45; 19:2; any reference to the Holy Spirit). Moreover, we learn that as image bearers of God, we are to exhibit God’s character by being holy as well (Lev. 11:45; I Peter 1:15-16). Yet, holiness is a…
September 26, 2025
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Are You Trying to Create Experts or Mentor Students toward Excellence? The Two Are Not the Same

One factor behind the recent populist revolt in North America and other parts of the world stems from an increasing distrust of various experts (esp. medical scientists, journalists, and general scientists). There are numerous reasons for this distrust—some of them consistent with a Christian theological perspective, but other reasons have led to a problematic undermining…
September 3, 2025
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What Is a Christian Understanding and Measure of Not Belonging?

"The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.”                                Lev. 25:23 One of the popular topics and measures in higher education these days concerns belonging. My simple database search turned up over 600 academic journal articles on the subject over the past few…
August 22, 2025
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What Greater Freedom in a Higher Education System Produces: New Institutions, Institutional Deaths, and Some Long-Term Winners

I remember serving as an advisor on a fascinating master’s thesis that examined the origins of higher education in Texas. There is one historical bit of information that has stayed with me from that thesis. Before the Civil War, forty faith-informed colleges were started in Texas. Only two survived: Baylor University (1845) and the University…
July 8, 2025
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How Coaching Youth Sports Helped My Thinking about Christian Character

The most important activity that helped refine my view of character education was not taking classes on epistemology and ethics from Dallas Willard. Nor was it taking all my other Ph.D. classes that addressed virtue or moral development. It was coaching youth league sports. Granted, readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology led me to recognize…
June 25, 2025
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God Made All Nations from One Blood: The Origins of a Biblical Argument against Slavery

In 1526, William Tyndale’s ground-breaking translation of the English New Testament appeared. In this translation, Tyndale used a unique phrase that was not in John Wycliffe’s original English translation. Instead of translating a key passage from Paul’s sermon to the Athenians in Wycliffe’s original way, “ made of one all the kind of men” (Acts…
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Addressing Reductionistic “Nothing but” Scholarship: The Conversation around a New Definition of “Evangelical,” Part 2

I remember teaching a weekend course on American Christian history in the late 1990s. Since it was a weekend course for working adults, I used several videos in those late Saturday afternoon hours when eyes glazed and heads nodded. I found some great videos about the history of American Catholicism and African American Christianity, but…
May 28, 2025
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Addressing Reductionistic “Nothing but” Scholarship: The Conversation around a New Definition of “Evangelical,” Part 1

Christian scholars interested in Christ-animated learning have long observed that one major danger to such scholarship is reductionism. George Marsden helpfully summarized the problem in his book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, “Once we have a convincing explanation at the level of empirically researched connections we are inclined to think we have a complete…
May 27, 2025
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The Unredeemed Liberal Arts: And How to Save Them (Part 1)

If you ask almost any student or professor what the purpose of the liberal arts is, they will likely not give you an explicitly theologically informed answer. Instead, they will likely discuss how  “it fosters critical thinking,” or helps one “adopt different approaches to understanding,” or “trains one’s mind to be agile.”For samples of this…
April 7, 2025
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How Are Men Fallen? Evaluating a New Toxic Masculinity Scale

Just as both men and women are created in God’s image, we are also both fallen. Moreover, there can be sex differences among men and women (often simply in terms of percentages and not absolutes) in the ways they demonstrate virtue and vice. What that means and what the redemption of masculinity and femininity might…
March 28, 2025