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Addressing Reductionistic “Nothing but” Scholarship: The Conversation around a New Definition of “Evangelical,” Part 1

Christian scholars interested in Christ-animated learning have long observed that one major danger to such scholarship is reductionism. George Marsden helpfully summarized the problem in his book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, “Once we have a convincing explanation at the level of empirically researched connections we are inclined to think we have a complete…
May 27, 2025
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Intellectual Pilgrimage: Christians in the Contemporary Academy

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship became an instant classic when it was released by Oxford University Press in 1997, but I must admit that I always disliked the title. While it is an effective attention-­grabber, the text itself is far more nuanced and polite than the title presages. Additionally, the word “outrageous” conveys neither…
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Catholic vs. Protestant

“In the one Christ, we are one.”                                          -motto of Pope Leo XIV The Catholic Church has recently elected a new pope, not quite three weeks after the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday. Meanwhile, I have been thinking about Christian education in the city of Seattle, where I teach at a Protestant university…
May 21, 2025
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Renaissance Man: Charlie Peacock’s Memoir Drives Deep into Evangelicalism’s Historic Twentieth-Century Turn

A real renaissance is hard to come by. No birth is easy, let alone a rebirth. But that’s what American evangelicals experienced—that’s what they accomplished—from the mid-twentieth century through the opening decades of the twenty first: renaissance. Joel Carpenter describes the initial stirrings of this vast movement, in the aftermath of the 1925 Scopes Trial, with…
May 19, 2025

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Personifying Prudence: The Face(s) of Wisdom

Wisdom often feels like a vague, shadowy concept—something we all want but do not really understand. Sometimes we equate wisdom with intelligence, but it certainly is not guaranteed by a high IQ. Sometimes we talk about wisdom as if it were a synonym for inner peace or an automatic characteristic gained from old age or…
June 25, 2024
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Making Virtue Personal, Part 1

My students rarely know what kindness really means. When they provide feedback on their classmates’ papers, for instance, they think kindness means happy faces and exclamation marks, and a “Great Job!” written at the end. And they often think people like me, who offer them substantial critiques to help make their writing better, are simply…
June 24, 2024
BlogBook Review

Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age.

One exercise on political partisanship I enjoy doing with my classes is to read out a list of words and phrases while the students work together to classify them as either red or blue—Republican or Democrat. It starts off simply with broad groups in the population: the students all “know” that farmers are red while…
June 20, 2024
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In Defense of Those Who Work and Build, Part 2

In yesterday’s post, I showed how the Victorian Thomas Carlyle, though a strong critic of the Industrial Revolution, defended work as a good and godly thing. In this post, I shall extend my analysis to two other Victorians who also balanced a critique of the excesses of industrialism with a celebration of our God-given call…
June 19, 2024
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In Defense of Those Who Work and Build, Part 1

Our academic age celebrates the critic more than the creator. One finds this represented in our most discussed theory of the past few decades—critical theory. Contemporary academics tend to look with suspicion upon entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. This academic tendency is not unusual for this age though. Academic critics during the Industrial Revolution exhibited…
June 18, 2024
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Stewarding Our Bodies: Less Than a Dozen Christian Colleges Give Catalogue Evidence of Teaching Health and Human Performance Gen Eds Christianly

This past year I wrote about the bodily stewardship crisis on Christian campuses. In a national survey of student affairs leaders, I noted that our research team asked them to rank sixteen themes they might emphasize on their campus. Educating students about stewardship of the body finished dead last. The second most neglected topic was…
June 17, 2024
BlogBook Review

Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction

What is neo-Calvinism? The authors describe it as holistic, organic, and modern in its orthodoxy (8). Still, these terms are pregnant with meaning and need explanation. Thankfully, Brock and Sutanto have provided an excellent text to help us understand neo-Calvinism within its own theological genesis. There is a particular salience to the book’s emphasis on…
June 13, 2024