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An Appeal to Embrace Purposeful Mentorship

Writing in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Hans Sanders tells the story of Cris Hassold of New College Florida.Hank Sanders, “A Professor’s Final Gift to Her Students: Her Life Savings,” New York Times, May 11, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/us/cris-hassold-professor-new-college-will.html. A story that in so many ways captures the best of what the university can provide…
July 25, 2025
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That sense of nagging fear

That sense of nagging fear  There is a nagging fear I experience sometimes. I’m tempted to attribute it to something earthly and circumstantial - some specific, mundane event or condition that, once solved, will make the fear go away. But I know better now. This fear is repetitive and familiar. Finally, I begin to recognize…
July 21, 2025
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Review of Sarah Irving-­Stonebraker, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age

In Priests of History, Sarah Irving-­Stonebraker diagnoses a partial cause of the identity crisis currently plaguing Western culture, generally, and the Western Church, particularly. We do not know ourselves because we have neglected the past. We are “ahistorical,” a term used by Irving-­Stonebraker to describe the loss of “meaningful engagement with, and connection to, history”…
July 17, 2025
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Review of Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

Biblical Critical Theory is sparklingly clear and engagingly written. Part of the reason it is so engaging is that Christopher Watkin’s personal story is woven into the story without ever being intrusive or grating. As Christian academic writers, we can learn from the way he as a human being seeking truth and wholeness addresses us…
July 10, 2025

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Toward a Christian Film Aesthetic

As co-director of the Marion E. Wade Center, the world’s most comprehensive archive of books and autographs by and about C. S. Lewis and six of his most important influencers, I have delighted in reading unpublished correspondence and manuscripts by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), whose radio plays about Jesus nurtured Lewis’s spiritual life. Among the many…
September 14, 2020
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What does Christianity have to do with Economics? Three Approaches

Since most faculty are trained in thoroughly secular universities and disciplines, it can take some work to figure out what difference Christian faith can have in the practice of your discipline. I have noticed that there is a particular difficulty of this kind for economists. In this blog post, I describe the background for that…
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September 11, 2020
BlogPress Release

Welcome to the Christ Animating Learning Blog

Christian Scholar’s Review is pleased to announce the launch of “Christ Animating Learning”—an interdisciplinary and interactive forum focused on the relationship the Christian faith shares with the practices of teaching and scholarship.  “Christ Animating Learning” launched Monday, with posts appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Readers can access it at https://christianscholars.com/blog/ or sign-up at https://christianscholars.com/newsletter/…
September 9, 2020
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Consider the Snail: Teaching Online and Learning to Breathe

Snails, it turns out, have things to teach us, even for folk with advanced degrees. Things that could be relevant to an online course. Things that carry a faint echo of wisdom’s laughter at the delights of creation, as narrated in Proverbs 8. Things that also have to do with how we use technology for…
September 8, 2020
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Teaching Culture in Covidtide

A new school year is beginning, and I’m thinking about how to teach cultural history.  There are a lot of reasons to get “meta” right now, as a cultural historian. (Specifically, I’m a professor of Art History and Visual Studies.) First, there’s mode of delivery, and the cultural implications of that. If “the medium is the…
September 2, 2020
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Who Are You to Your Students? An Experiment

I am starting this year by asking students to change one of the most important liturgies of the classroom—what they call me.  As David Smith has taught us, if we want to engage in Christian teaching, we need to interrogate all of our classroom liturgies through a Christian perspective.  In this age of identity, the most important…
August 27, 2020
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The Ethnic Church Attendance Gap at Christian Colleges and Universities

Recently, while analyzing interviews from seniors at our university, we came across a curious and disturbing finding.  In three consecutive interviews, non-white students talked about how they had not attended church during their time at the university, and it showed in their own admitted lack of spiritual growth and sense of belonging at the institution.  Puzzled, we…
August 24, 2020
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Christ-Animating Learning: What Do We Mean?

For many years, Christian’s Scholar’s Review has proclaimed that “its primary objective is the publication of peer-reviewed scholarship and research, within and across the disciplines, that advances the integration of faith and learning…” Despite the historic use of “integration” language, we have decided to instead focus on “Christ-Animating learning.”  Why do we now propose a…
August 19, 2020
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How Did Christians Approach Pagan Learning?

When the early Church began building its own educational tradition, it faced the challenge of how developing this new Christian revelation should interact with Greek and Roman thinking. They had to ask, as the early Christian thinker Tertullian did, “What indeed does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?”Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics, 1:7. Various Church Fathers…
August 17, 2020