A couple of years ago, my son-in-law showed me ChatGPT on his phone. I had heard of it before, but didn’t know what it could do. It seemed pretty cool, and he was able to have it answer some questions and then even use it to write a short sermon that was somewhat suitable for…

I am very grateful to Christian Scholar’s Review for sponsoring this forum and to the contributors for their kind and constructive remarks. I am especially gratified that the consensus among the commentators seems to be that, while both mainstream academia and American Christianity have changed dramatically in the past three decades, the principles of Christian…

I wish to begin by thanking Christian Scholar’s Review for the opportunity and privilege to comment on the second edition of George Marsden’s Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. I first read this book as a student at Grove City College in the mid-­2000s, where it was assigned in an upper-­level history seminar. I have been…

In the same way you can discover something important about a university by how it names its department teaching about Christianity (e.g., Religion, Theology, Bible, Christian Studies), you can learn something about a university by how it labels the moral ideals it sets forth for students. You can also ascertain a great deal about them…

The primary claims of the first edition of George Marsden’s book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, remain as salient and persuasive as they were thirty years ago: First, Christian academics may—I will argue should—be doing their scholarship from a Christian point of view (more shortly on what that might mean in practice), and second,…

The first edition of George Marsden’s book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship appeared the same year I completed my doctorate. I eagerly read it and it immediately became a touchstone book for my early career. And so, it was with great enthusiasm that I began reading the second edition. How have the ideas aged?…

I remember teaching a weekend course on American Christian history in the late 1990s. Since it was a weekend course for working adults, I used several videos in those late Saturday afternoon hours when eyes glazed and heads nodded. I found some great videos about the history of American Catholicism and African American Christianity, but…

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…

When George Marsden published The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship in 1997, I was a couple years away from completing my PhD in English. I was a young Christian studying at a state university in exactly the kind of academic environment hostile to religious faith that Marsden addresses in his book. Having been educated entirely…