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Theological Foundations for Creation Care: Replacing Apathy and Despair with Hope and Christian Virtues — A Review Essay (Part 1)

Andrew J. Spencer’s and Steven Bouma-­Prediger’s recent releases applying Christian theology to contemporary environmental problems share similar goals and face common constraints. As trade paperbacks, both books are intended to motivate an indifferent or skeptical Christian readership and theologically equip students to address hot-­button political topics. The authors self-­identify as Evangelical, utilize the language of…
December 11, 2024
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Shaping Witnesses: Baylor’s English Graduate Program

In the past year or so, six graduates of Baylor University’s English graduate program have published books about the arts of reading well and the value of forming Christian imaginations. Jessica Hooten Wilson (grad of 2009) published Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Jessica has also published several…
December 10, 2024
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Sharing Our Screens

Recently I re-watched The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man, played by Jim Carey, who discovers that his life has been broadcast to the world as a reality TV show. Though produced a quarter of a century ago, the movie’s critique of an “always-on,” surveillant media culture felt timely and spoke to my…
December 9, 2024
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Not Quite Exiles nor Never Much of an Eden: The Meaning of Vocation for the Professorate Thirty Years after the Publication of Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden

The early 1990s saw a rash of books on religion and higher education, and Mark Schwehn’s 1993 Exiles From Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America was a book unlike any of the rest. It begins with two memorable illustrations of the central problem Schwehn addresses. The first recalls a faculty get-­together at the…
December 5, 2024
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Be the Hope You Seek

A friend asked me not so long ago, “Where can we find hope in such uncertain times?” Many of us have been asking this reasonable and pressing question for much of the past five years. As Christians, we can easily recite a couple of the 140 Bible verses that, in various different stories and admonitions,…
December 4, 2024
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Christ-Animated Scholarship and Human Worth

Every once in a while, I come across an article or book that exemplifies the best of what Christ-animated scholarship can and should be. I recently came across one such article in the field of psychology that addressed the topic of human worth. The concepts of self-worth and self-esteem have a long history in the…
December 3, 2024

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Spiritual Battle in the Classroom (part 2)

Zero. That’s the overwhelming response when I ask students to number the sermons they’ve heard on Satan or spiritual battle in the past year. If they are not getting this information from the pulpit, where will students hear about a topic so prevalent in the Scriptures? In the previous blog, we considered the biblical support…
May 31, 2023
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Spiritual Battle in the Classroom (part 1)

“Demons, leave my students alone!” I confess, it’s almost as weird to write this, as it was to pray that day in my classroom in front of wide-eyed students. But, why? After all, I was a faith-professing professor lecturing to Christian students at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) on the topic of gendered…
May 30, 2023
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Cognitive Neuroscientific Theism

In Leap of Faith (Paramount Pictures: 1992), Steve Martin offers a modern take on Elmer Gantry as conman and revivalist Jonas Nightengale. In the movie, Nightengale’s bus breaks down while in the small town of Rustwater, Kansas. As he waits for it to be fixed, he decides to run a series of tent meetings complete…
May 26, 2023
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Social Controversies in the Classroom: How to Put Learning First

Discussing emotionally charged social controversies in the classroom is one of the few parts of my job for which I feel really well-equipped. I just finished a teaching appointment in systematic theology, but I obtained my doctoral training in that field relatively late in life. My original doctoral training was in political philosophy. (I’m the…
May 24, 2023
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Much Ado About Theories: Teaching Marx and Other Suspicious Types in Christian Higher Education (Part 1)

I’ve taught an undergraduate sociological theory course for 20-some years, and it’s long been one of my favorites. Theories are fascinating phenomena. They can prod people to adjust their gaze, see things anew, step into the shoes of another, and occasionally even shift paradigms. Theories can delight, enrage, puzzle, unnerve, and challenge. They can move…
May 19, 2023
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Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry (Book Review)

Brad Leithauser’s new book, Rhyme’s Rooms, is a feast, a palace, a work of beauty that deserves a wide audience beyond the academy, as well as inclusion in any serious course on poetry. It also seems to be Christian scholarship of the best sort: serious intellectual work conversing in a rigorous and diverse secular profession,…
May 18, 2023
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Keeping First Things First: A Charge to Christian Academics

I teach literature today in no small part thanks to Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane’s realistic novella depicting the impoverished conditions of life in the Bowery at the turn of the twentieth century.This piece has been adapted from an address to the Sigma Tau Delta chapter of Liberty University, delivered March 10,…
May 17, 2023
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Ask for Christian Theorizing and a Christian Positionality Statement: A Proposal for Dissertations and Theses at Christian Universities

As mentioned in yesterday's post, my research undertaken with my graduate students has discovered that Christian graduate education is not very Christian. The marketing, objectives, and curriculum at two-thirds of programs show little sign of Christian influence. Our undergraduate programs may be different, but our graduate programs are really imitations of the secular programs from…
May 16, 2023