In ancient times, the discipline or field of rhetoric focused on speech, mostly in politics and law courts. Then with the advent of writing, rhetoric was extended to the written word. Today, however, rhetoric cannot include only spoken and written speech. With modern technologies, humans communicate in a variety of ways, not only through sermons…

At first glance, or even third, one might have difficulty seeing the connection between these three books. However, each makes a significant argument for the life of the church in this divisive age. How can Christians with divergent beliefs and markedly different political positions communicate with one another? How can the fractured church communicate to…

In our previous post, we compared the role of Christian professors with that of the Old Testament prophets as “stewards of truth.” Following the model of the prophets of the Old Testament, we are required to maintain the truth of our respective disciplines, deliver it convincingly in the classroom, and continuously refine it to apply…

Serving as a Christian university professor is not the most celebrated job in America. It is not an ignoble profession, but few of us would describe ourselves as overpaid. Most of us are exempt from federal minimum wage and overtime laws. One would think the years of education required to serve as a professor would…

One of the most ambitious attempts to answer the question of human flourishing appears in Tyler VanderWeele’s A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing. An epidemiologist whose work has helped shape contemporary research on flourishing, VanderWeele engages many of the themes explored by earlier writers—meaning in the face of suffering, justice within community, and…

What if the attributes of flourishing could be identified, defined, and studied as a social phenomenon, allowing those insights to inform interventions designed to improve well-­being and happiness? What if science itself could be harnessed to advance human flourishing? Many social scientists pursued enthusiastic answers to these questions. The chief architect of what would become…

In the immediate post-­war period, the writers representing Flourishing 1.0 primarily examined the crises of flourishing within the interior life—questions of meaning, selfhood, and the courage required to live amid despair. Yet they were also attentive to the broader cultural forces that produced such crises. Tillich, for example, warned that political systems such as Communism…

What does it mean to flourish? The Israelites in Babylon likely did not imagine that they would prosper in exile. Yet through the prophet Jeremiah, they were instructed to build houses, plant gardens, and seek the good of the city in which they lived, even knowing that the exile would outlast most of them. Flourishing,…

I am a teacher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and have been a student of God’s creation all my life. My family and I attend Geneva Campus Church, where several years ago, Rev. Bill Vander Hoven came for three months to fill a pastoral vacancy. I saw him often during my student coffee…

“For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” Romans 13:4 When taking Russian lessons in Moscow, my Russian language teacher and I…