One of the primary things we learn about God in the Bible is that he is holy (Lev. 11:44-45; 19:2; any reference to the Holy Spirit). Moreover, we learn that as image bearers of God, we are to exhibit God’s character by being holy as well (Lev. 11:45; I Peter 1:15-16). Yet, holiness is a…

We typically relegate the imagination to the realm of make believe. By creating fantastical worlds and playing pretend, the imagination in this view seems like an escape from reality. But as Judith Wolfe’s The Theological Imagination explains, the imagination is not an escape from reality, but what shapes our reality. Following in the philosophical tradition…

Darren Dyck, in Will & Love: Shakespeare and the Motion of the Soul, takes the turn to religion in a different direction by demonstrating how the medieval mode of theological romance in Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer provides the interpretive key to Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the volitional motion of love. By “theological romance,” Dyck means the…

David Anonby also begins Shakespeare on Salvation: Crossing the Reformation Divide with a reasoned defense for his engagement with religion in Shakespeare, invoking some of the same scholars that Oser does in his introduction. Anonby describes those in the turn to religion who have challenged the “secularizing narrative of the theater” (4), before turning to…

Editor's Note: Due to an earlier failure of the e-mail distribution of this three-part post, we are reposting it over the next three days.   It has been approximately twenty-five years since the “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies. When I informally polled a few colleagues in history, psychology, and social work about a turn to…

Hunter’s overall point is well taken, though: new efforts at undergirding democracy became more focused on reason (internally derived ideas) or on natural law (externally derived absolutes), and less so an amalgamation of the two, feeding eventually into a culture war. For instance, John Dewey had great faith in our capacity to reason our way…

James Davison Hunter wants us to know things look bad because they are bad and have been so for quite some time: the United States is not only facing stark polarizations in our time, but, he argues, these polarizations are a result of the longstanding fault lines within our foundations for democracy. In this long-awaited…

“…but test everything; hold fast what is good.” — 1 Thess. 5:21 (ESV) I teach computer science students how to program computers, and testing is a crucial component of learning to program. In fact, the modern approach to software engineering advocates a Test Driven Development where testing is simultaneously intertwined with the writing of code.…

One of the strangest features of contemporary higher education is its false egalitarianism. Teachers and students, by definition, are not equals with respect to the practice in which they are engaged, though of course they may be equals in other respects. If the student were on the same level as the teacher, he wouldn’t need…

Editor's Note: We apologize for the failure of the next two parts of the originally scheduled review essay to post over the last two days. We had some technical difficulties with their posting. We will run the full three-part review series again at a later date. It is a well-known demographic reality that, considered as…