In his 1939 sermon Learning in Wartime, CS Lewis considered whether education should continue amid high-stakes global conflict. Is learning something that should be suspended during a war, saved only for times of peace and predictability? Or does the acquisition of knowledge, learning, thinking, and prudential judgment become more important during moments of upheaval? Predictably…

For two thousand years Christians have wrestled with what it means to follow Jesus’s command to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God. In Romans 13 Paul tells us we should obey and honor the authorities, and his Roman citizenship twice plays a pivotal role in the drama…

It was a quiet morning in my basement carrel in the Calvin College library. I was reading the Gospel of John— the only book of the Bible past Genesis that begins with the words, “In the beginning...”. My family had recently left our beloved Town of Dunn in Wisconsin for my childhood home of Grand…

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…