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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life, Part III: Persons

The first post in this series pondered problematic modern Christian conceptions of truth, and the second pondered prescribed classic Christian practices of love, arguing for its priority. The focus in both was not on compelling truths about God, nor virtuous love of God or nature. Instead, the conundrum was what Christians believe to be true…
April 16, 2025
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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life, Part II: Love

Yesterday’s post unpacked the problematic character of modern positivist Christian conceptualization and prioritization of truth. Though truth undoubtably matters enormously, it was proposed that absolute truth about metaphysical matters is not attainable, that assertions of propositional truth claims are prone to exercising power and producing interpersonal alienation, and that in profound experiential (not necessarily epistemological)…
April 15, 2025
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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life

Part I: Truth My colleague had just finished delivering a public lecture on the challenge that intersex persons—those born with a mix of male and female organs, chromosomes, and hormones—present to the church. A perturbed member of the audience was expressing his disapproval of her call for the Christian church to understand, affirm, and welcome…
April 14, 2025
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Christian Reflections on Vibe Coding

If you follow trends in software engineering, you may have encountered the term “vibe coding,” recently popularized by Andrej Karpathy, deep learning researcher and OpenAI co-founder.Kevin, R. (2025, February 27). Not a Coder? With A.I., Just Having an Idea Can Be Enough. New York Times. This is how he defines the approach: There’s a new kind…
April 11, 2025
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Trump’s Tariffs Fail the Tests of Stewardship and Justice

Economists generally don’t like tariffs. This was true even before the latest round of tariffs implemented by President Donald Trump. Various surveys have found that around 90 percent of economists believe that tariffs will negatively impact economic welfare, and a similar amount believe that tariffs lead to inflation.As just one example, see https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/framing-next-four-years-tariffs-tax-cuts-and-other-uncertainties-trump. This is…
April 10, 2025

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Introducing The Christian Scholar’s Review Summer Issue

When we receive a manuscript that looks promising for publication, I often ask its authors to keep two things in mind as they work on revisions. First, I ask them to make it clear why people should care about their topic, reminding them that most of their readers will likely be outside their field. However,…
August 28, 2024
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Understanding Before Expecting to Be Understood

In How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (2023), David Brooks calls us to re-think how much true influence we can have on others if we do not take the time to genuinely know them and hear their perspectives. In a time of distrust and uncertainty across…
August 23, 2024
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Redeeming Chapel: A Success Story

In 2018, a group of us at Baylor helped start the Baylor Faith and Character Study (see here for more). We did so for a variety of reasons. First, we wanted to know the faith and character of our incoming students. As any good missiology or pedagogy course will teach you, you have to know…
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Faith and Story

“Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world’s memory. The past is erased without stories.” ― Chaim Potok, Old Men At Midnight One Sunday after church, my daughter and our very hip lead pastor began talking about Harry Potter. With the names “Tonks and Lupin,” the differences in education, experience, gender, age, fashion, and…
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The Tragedy of Teaching: Greatness Without Goodness

It is the time of year when those of us who serve as teachers, from college to Kindergarten, are ramping up our preparation for the upcoming term. In my home university, new faculty are arriving on campus this week for onboarding, next week will be devoted to faculty meetings at the university and college level,…
August 19, 2024
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Christian Legal Thought – Why Bother?

One of the first questions I ask students in my Christian Legal Thought seminar is what they expect Christianity might have to say about law. A common answer is that Christian teaching can provide guidance about what the legal rules should be.  Many of my students have been taught the importance of having a Christian…
August 16, 2024
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Reading Tragedy and Professing Hope

A few years back, one of my literature classes read Misha Nogha’s “Chippoke Na Gomi,”Misha Nogha, “Chippoke Na Gomi,” The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 630-636. an intriguing and provocative science fiction story exploring the repercussions of atomic weaponry and the responsibilities we have to one another.This article first…
August 15, 2024
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The Scandal of Required English Classes at Christian Universities

Every Christian university requires at least one English composition, writing, and/or literature class. Thus, one would think that someone reviewing those course descriptions would find considerable evidence demonstrating how Christianity relates to these basic courses. You would be wrong. We recently analyzed the required gen ed course descriptions at all Protestant and Catholic universities that…
August 14, 2024