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College Students Want Confidence: But Is It a Virtue that Can Be Taught?

Many of our students lack confidence and want more of it. For example, our research team gathered goals from almost 2,700 students nationwide from 14 institutions, for almost 6,500 goals. One clear longing they expressed was a desire for confidence, articulated in their goals such as the following:  “Improve my self-esteem/confidence.”  “Build my confidence.”  “Be…
October 16, 2026
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Frolicking in new Fields with AI

I had a question: could artificial intelligence (AI) help me visualise the textual form of my thoughts and help me re-work them in a picture. That way I could look at them again in a different light and also have a different medium through which to explain them to other people? I’m reasonably competent at…
October 15, 2026
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Freud and Suspicion

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. This year, then, is his 170th birthday year. That’s not a significant marker, but having come across that fact, I was reminded of all that I read about Freud during the 150th anniversary, in 2006, when we were given many anecdotes about his life. Here is one that stuck…
October 14, 2026
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Those Who Love Their Maker Delight in His Handiwork

The title of this reflection on God’s handiwork comes from an assertion made by the beloved London preacher of the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It is from his commentary on Psalm 111—the Psalm of God’s Works, published in his seven-volume magnum opus, The Treasury of David. In the commentary, he continues the title’s assertion,…
October 9, 2026
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Vocations, Professions, and Our Motivations for Integration

It is a fundamental human urge to answer the questions: Who am I? Why do I matter? What is my life for? And because we are humans bearing the image of God, we have an indelible instinct that these questions of identity, value, and purpose have positive answers and that these answers have something to…
October 8, 2026

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Language Learning as Spiritual Medicine for a Culture of Narcissism

Today’s post is an excerpt of a longer talk given by David Lyle Jeffrey in May 2019 at a conference sponsored by the Christian Association for World Languages (CAWL). We are thankful for the opportunity to share Dr. Jeffrey’s wisdom for the benefit of Christian scholars of all disciplines. His commitment to the importance and power…
September 18, 2020
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The Poetry and Music of Science

In this blog, I write about the story of a new book, The Poetry and Music of Science. This account of the role of creativity and imagination in science, very under-emphasised in education and public discussion of science today, was motivated by my earlier search for a ‘theology of science’ articulated in the earlier (2014) book Faith and…
September 16, 2020
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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