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Envy and Crime and Punishment

Recently, especially after Elon Musk passed the trillionaire mark, many people posted online about the ways Musk’s money could help the poor. Others, including famous politicians, then chimed in about what could be done with lots of billionaires' money. Unsurprisingly, no one posted about what they were currently doing with their money or other possessions…
September 11, 2026
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Greed

A rabbi friend was leading a series of evening discussions about the Sinai commandments for folks in his synagogue, and he invited me to join him in the session dealing with coveting. Some business scandals were much in the news at the time, so we did give some attention to the topic of greed in…
September 10, 2026
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Book Review of Disability and Evangelism: The Good News of the Fullness of God’s Kingdom

For many Christian scholars, disability studies rarely come to mind when they think about the future of theological and missiological discourse. Yet it should. Globally, individuals with disabilities are among the largest unreached groups, with an estimated 90–95% never having encountered the gospel. In the United States, almost 59% do attend a religious service (2).…
September 9, 2026
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The Problem with Concept Creep and “Trauma”

A student I knew well confided in me last year, reporting that she was experiencing emotional distress related to trauma from her early childhood and needed an extension on an assignment. I did not doubt the veracity of the student’s report, nor did I feel it was my role to probe further into her struggles.…
September 8, 2026
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The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt has called this generation of students “The Anxious Generation.” That’s an interesting choice of words. Kierkegaard thought that anxiety is what we feel when we become aware that we are, despite everything we can point to as an excuse, fundamentally free, and therefore fundamentally responsible. We feel anxiety because we know we’re free;…
September 3, 2026

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Institutional Survival, The Chocolate War, and The Weight of Glory

All of us who read the Christian Scholars Review want Christian higher education to survive.  Most of us, anyway, are aware of the growing threats to our survival, both as individual colleges and universities; and to our survival as a collective enterprise. Where is Eastern Nazarene University today, Barrington, or Nyack—to limit ourselves for the…
December 3, 2025
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Academic Gratitude

We learn to practice virtues in specific contexts. Thus, academics always need to think about how to apply Christian virtues in their particular learning environment in specific ways. In particular, as academics, we should have special reasons to be thankful during this season. Anyone who teaches has received intellectual gifts that God does not bestow…
November 24, 2025
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The Ever Evolving and Evasive Nature of Knowledge

Editor's Note: Due to a technical issue with WordPress, this essay was published earlier this month without the text, only the tables. We have reposted the corrected version today.  Human culture and consciousness in the Global North have evolved profoundly over the past two millennia, and are conventionally referenced as the overlapping respective eras of…
November 21, 2025
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Thanksgiving, Hobbits, and the Way of Ennoblement

Jesus tells us that it is more blessed to give than to receive. With Thanksgiving approaching, I thought this an opportunity to reflect on giving, receiving, and what it means to be thankful. The popular conception of Thanksgiving is that it’s a time to give thanks for the blessings in our lives—for our family, friends,…
November 20, 2025
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Put on the Attire of Leadership (Part 2)

Many years ago, my wife, Phyllis, and I were the guests of the University of Notre Dame provost at a football game in South Bend, Indiana, between the Fighting Irish and West Point. At halftime, someone pointed me toward the private box where the leaders of the two schools were watching the game together. I…
November 19, 2025
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Leadership: It’s Not Only for Administrators (Part 1)

About 10 years after I became the president of Fuller Seminary, I received a letter from a college student asking me for career advice. His goal in life, he said, was to be the kind of academic president that I was, and he wondered how he should prepare for that role. I wrote back, telling…
November 18, 2025
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Music: The Soul of the Liberal Arts

Many colleges and universities, within the CCCU and without, continue to be faced with difficult questions regarding which academic programs to retain and which to “consolidate.” There are an incredible number of factors that inform each of these considerations, and I do not covet those who are tasked with the corresponding decisions. It is often…
November 17, 2025
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A Distinctly Christian Approach to Engineering

Should there be a distinctively Christian approach to engineering? If so, is it possible? After all, Christians and non-Christians seem to agree on all the technical details in engineering, like integration, derivation, Fourier transforms, and finite element analysis. So why do we take a distinctly Christian approach to engineering? The first and foremost reason that…
November 14, 2025