Richard J. Mouw

One of my courses in seminary—a half-century ago!—had a lasting impact on my thinking. It was about world religions, and especially helpful for me was an assigned text, Christian Faith and Other Faiths, by Stephen Neill,Stephen Neill, Christian Faith and Other Faiths: The Christian Dialogue with Other Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). then a…

We were doing an interview on an NPR station, a kind of “point-counterpoint” thing. The other interviewee was a self-identified agnostic, and the topic was the rights of academic institutions to “discriminate” on the basis of religious beliefs. My dialogue partner was not overtly hostile to religion as such. Indeed he said some nice things…

The October 2000 issue of The Atlantic featured a lengthy article by the Boston College sociologist Alan Wolfe on “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind.” Wolfe’s portrayal of evangelicalism’s intellectual contributions came as a word of encouragement to many of us who had heeded the warnings that Mark Noll had issued six years earlier in…

People often ask me what books have most influenced me in my intellectual journey. While I have a list ready in my mind to draw upon in giving an answer, I have come to think that the inquirer can learn even more about me if they would ask about particular passages in what I have…

In June of 1976 I was one of the speakers at a conference at the University of Dallas. The theme of the conference was “The Laity: A New Direction.” I was initiated there into a group of people who were to meet regularly for the next few years to strategize about promoting the cause of…

It was a Tuesday after Saturday’s graduation events. My assistant brought the day’s mail into my office and set the pile in front of me. She had tossed away the obvious junk mail and had taken the correspondence that I needed to deal with out of the envelopes. “I did not open this one,” she…

It is a healthy thing for Christian scholars to have some favorite heretics. I have a small group of them that I confer with occasionally. Most of them are long gone, so I have to communicate with them by going back to their writings. Some folks may think that the very idea of having favorite…

I once heard a preacher deliver a sermon on Jesus’ encounter, in Mark 10, with “the rich young ruler.” I have heard many sermons on that story, but never before any like this one. The preacher chose to focus on verse 21, where it says that Jesus looked at the young man. Much of the…

When our son moved into a dormitory as a Calvin College student in the 1980s I had already been on the faculty there for fifteen years. But suddenly I experienced the campus in new ways. I had known all along, of course, that there were dormitories, parties, various student services, and the like. But that…