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Seeing, and Understanding

“They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, ‘Do you see anything?’ He looked up and…
April 30, 2025
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Rediscovering Meaning

Outside the friendly confines of the CSR blogosphere, society is fragmenting (or perhaps you could say it is fragmented). Truth itself seems increasingly privatized and tribal, adrift in a sea of relativism, subjective interpretations, and bold-faced lies. Political debates have intensified into existential wars, revealing a culture that feels not merely divided, but antagonistic, hateful,…
April 29, 2025
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Bad Daddy

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière - WGA11837 - Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière - Wikipedia The French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a beautiful embalmer of royalty. His paintings of emperors and aristocrats are as ravishing as they are uncanny, with their rubbery limbs, elongated necks and bovine eyes. His portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere,…
April 28, 2025
BlogReviews

An Extended Review of Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

Harold Laswell famously defined politics as “who gets what, when, and how.” These decisions are surely as fraught now as they were when Aristotle wrote about politics in ancient Athens. Politics has always been about power: who has the power to determine who gets what, when, and how? When it comes to power, Christians live…
April 25, 2025
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Love for Truth: Pondering Dennis Hiebert’s Love-First Epistemology.

In the fundamentalist churches of my childhood, propositional truths were weapons of spiritual warfare, wielded to help your friends and harm your enemies. Propositional truths held the community together, and they held the world at bay. Disagreements about propositional truths split all three of the churches my family attended before I went off to college.…
April 24, 2025
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“When in the Boat Together” ft. the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities’ David A. Hoag I Saturdays at Seven – Special Episode

In this special episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with David A. Hoag, President of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Hoag opens by discussing the investments Christian colleges and universities make in fostering relationship between faith and learning and how the CCCU is prepared to increase efforts…
April 23, 2025

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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
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Deep Thoughts about the Meaning of Life

“Hypocrites!” Jesus leveled this harsh judgment with a single word, and he was just ramping up. After describing the people’s remarkable ability to predict the weather, he chastised them: “You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky. How is it that you don’t know how to interpret this present time?”Lk.…
November 8, 2023
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Disabling Scripture? A Response to Melanie Howard

In her two-part series, “Disabling Ableism,” Melanie A. Howard encourages Christian educators “to engage in our mission-driven work by rooting out the ableism that separates us from one another and denies us the flourishing for which were created.” We warmly affirm Howard’s intent to raise awareness of the often-latent bias of ableism, to increase access…
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Bootstrapping

In the modern world, youth culture, and especially collegiate culture, is often activist culture. Among the college-aged, a freshness of vision combines with just enough personal skill and knowledge to beget (at least sometimes) a burning sense of responsibility. One phrase associated with collegiate protest culture, and with social activism in general, is “be the…
November 6, 2023
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Midlife Reflections of a Professor Mom

Author’s note: This piece is based on a speech delivered to graduate students at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in 2008, when I could legitimately claim to be midlife. I dedicate it to my daughter, Natalie, who will soon be starting a tenure-track position of her own…
November 2, 2023