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Theological Foundations for Creation Care: Replacing Apathy and Despair with Hope and Christian Virtues — A Review Essay (Part 1)

Andrew J. Spencer’s and Steven Bouma-­Prediger’s recent releases applying Christian theology to contemporary environmental problems share similar goals and face common constraints. As trade paperbacks, both books are intended to motivate an indifferent or skeptical Christian readership and theologically equip students to address hot-­button political topics. The authors self-­identify as Evangelical, utilize the language of…
December 11, 2024
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Shaping Witnesses: Baylor’s English Graduate Program

In the past year or so, six graduates of Baylor University’s English graduate program have published books about the arts of reading well and the value of forming Christian imaginations. Jessica Hooten Wilson (grad of 2009) published Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Jessica has also published several…
December 10, 2024
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Sharing Our Screens

Recently I re-watched The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man, played by Jim Carey, who discovers that his life has been broadcast to the world as a reality TV show. Though produced a quarter of a century ago, the movie’s critique of an “always-on,” surveillant media culture felt timely and spoke to my…
December 9, 2024
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Not Quite Exiles nor Never Much of an Eden: The Meaning of Vocation for the Professorate Thirty Years after the Publication of Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden

The early 1990s saw a rash of books on religion and higher education, and Mark Schwehn’s 1993 Exiles From Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America was a book unlike any of the rest. It begins with two memorable illustrations of the central problem Schwehn addresses. The first recalls a faculty get-­together at the…
December 5, 2024
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Be the Hope You Seek

A friend asked me not so long ago, “Where can we find hope in such uncertain times?” Many of us have been asking this reasonable and pressing question for much of the past five years. As Christians, we can easily recite a couple of the 140 Bible verses that, in various different stories and admonitions,…
December 4, 2024
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Christ-Animated Scholarship and Human Worth

Every once in a while, I come across an article or book that exemplifies the best of what Christ-animated scholarship can and should be. I recently came across one such article in the field of psychology that addressed the topic of human worth. The concepts of self-worth and self-esteem have a long history in the…
December 3, 2024

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The threat of AI is not that it will consciously take over: The threat is that we will unconsciously let it

You’ve heard the story. Advanced technology is created, turns deviant, and coldly proceeds to supplant humanity.  It is one of the more enduring science fiction tropes. From the cautionary imagery of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Tom Cruise battling Artificial Intelligence in the latest Mission Impossible blockbuster, the robots going rogue theme consistently occupies our imaginative…
November 28, 2023
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Beauty and the End of Education

When you find out you are expecting your first baby—before you tell anyone else—the Internet already knows. It also assumes that you will be making space in your home to facilitate the presence of this new life, thus commencing a bombardment of advertisements for all manner of materialistic goods that pretend to assure you: all…
November 27, 2023
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What Is a Christian University? A New Book That Answers This Question

During my academic career researching faith-based higher education in North America and around the world, I have received three types of emails. First, parents often write me with their questions about the confusing array of Christian colleges and universities. They are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they realize that unlike buying…
November 17, 2023
BlogBook Review

Faithful Learning: A Vision for Theologically Integrated Education

I have taught at Houston Christian (formerly Houston Baptist) University since 1991, and I am happy to report that the university has spent the last two decades intentionally recruiting, encouraging, and equipping professors committed to the integration of faith and learning in every discipline of the modern university. I, along with dozens of my colleagues,…
November 16, 2023
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The Blessed Inescapability of Service

Sometimes students’ reasons for becoming entrepreneurs go beyond the desire for lifestyle freedom. Some young people bristle at the idea of having someone in authority over them. More than autonomy, they want power and immunity from the demands of others, and they imagine being their own boss as equivalent to achieving it. They imagine organizing…
November 15, 2023
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Introducing Christian Scholar’s Review 2023 Fall Issue

As a multidisciplinary journal, we strive to ensure that all of our pieces would interest a general academic audience. This doesn’t mean they are dummied down in any sense of that phrase. The articles stand on their own as academic pieces. In multiple indexes such as Google Scholar and Researchgate, I can see that our…
November 14, 2023
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A Key Practice for Developing the Evangelical Mind

The October 2000 issue of The Atlantic featured a lengthy article by the Boston College sociologist Alan Wolfe on “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind.” Wolfe’s portrayal of evangelicalism’s intellectual contributions came as a word of encouragement to many of us who had heeded the warnings that Mark Noll had issued six years earlier in…
November 10, 2023