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BlogReviews

A Review of Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians

I cannot decide if Amy-­Jill Levine’s recent book, Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians, is properly or poorly titled. To be sure, the reason for the wording is obvious. It is a book about Jesus written primarily for those who would not self-­identify as Christians. Levine notes in her introduction that she writes “to atheists,…
March 13, 2025
Blog

The Blame Game: Moving Beyond Simple Attributions in Higher Education

I had a brilliant idea. My students were going to solve REAL LIFE PROBLEMS. It was a business communications course with a dozen undergrads. I put them in groups, used some scenarios from the textbook company, and sent them off to do a multi-week project to create a business proposal. What could go wrong? Apparently,…
March 12, 2025
BlogEditor's Preface

Introducing the Winter 2025 Issue of CSR

Pulling together each Christian Scholar’s Review issue is a labor of love and a labor-intensive team effort. Usually, at the end of my prefaces, I thank one of our transitioning team members, but I’m not sure how many people make it to the end of my quarterly missives. So, this time around, I start with…
March 11, 2025
Blog

Teaching About Racial Colorblindness: Some Strategies, Struggles, and Confessions

As someone who teaches about the psychological pitfalls of racial colorblindness, it’s been jolting to see this ideology being touted as an ideal way of relating to one another. For example, President Trump has repeatedly used this term, including during his inauguration speech. Recently, against the backdrop of the current public sentiments about racial colorblindness,…
March 10, 2025
Blog

Rethinking the Promotion of Adaptation in the University

Like most college professors in this Year of our Lord 2025, I sometimes think about what I would do if my position got the axe. I never come up with any good ideas, and my institution is relatively healthy, so I usually just let it go and get on with my work. Tomorrow will take…
March 7, 2025
Blog

Creating and Redeeming Institutions: A Christian Approach

“All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.” Rousseau, Emile, Book 1 In the last decade, politicians, academics, and activists have called for abolishing various institutions (e.g., “abolish the police,” “abolish USAID”). These calls emerge out of the declining trust in almost every institution, which is at a historic low for particular institutions…
March 6, 2025

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Blog

Purgatory: What to Make of a Gifted Athlete? (Part 1)

In my last post, I focused on the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno. There I attempted to draw lessons out of Dante’s text regarding the place of courage in sport. Here, I want to extend the examination to the second book of the Divine Comedy, the Purgatory. In this post, I will…
April 10, 2023
Blog

On Deserts and Discipline: For Lent

In the Seattle Art Museum, there is a little painting that often perplexes my students. It shows a scrawny, aged, half-nude man kneeling on desert ground and facing a small crucifix mounted on a stick. His left arm is extended with its empty hand splayed; his right hand holds a gray, prism-shaped rock. And despite…
April 7, 2023
BlogBook Review

Playing as Others: Theology and Ethical Responsibility in Video Games

Since their inception, video games have often been viewed as trivial or unworthy of significant theological study. However, Benjamin Chicka argues that this posture is a mistake: video games represent powerful cultural artifacts that possess the potential for tremendous theological depth, and they provide us with new vistas of ethical possibilities. Whereas most serious theological…
April 6, 2023
Blog

Historicizing The Scarlet Letter and COVID-19

Earlier today as I was scrolling through my phone’s camera roll, I paused at pictures of March 2021. My son and daughter, five and six then, were masked at the grocery store in the canned vegetables section. The next picture was them a few months later, masked at the playground. As I scrolled through the…
April 5, 2023
BlogBook Review

Nurturing Faith: A Practical Theology for Educating Christians

This book is an admirable attempt to chart a “road map” for the discipleship and educational mission of the global, twenty-first century church. The authors identify their work as a “practical” theology because it seeks to inform the church’s practice through “self-conscious examination” of current practices (9). By “faith” the authors mean “a knowledge-based, conviction-established,…
March 30, 2023
Blog

The Book I’d Give My Younger Self

If I could tell my college-aged self to read just one book, it would be The Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph B. Soloveitchik.It was published by Doubleday as a book in 2006, but its original form was an essay published in 1965 in Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 7:2 (Summer 1965). To minimize…
March 29, 2023
Blog

I Don’t Want My Students to Be Well-rounded

I recently found myself explaining again the value of a liberal arts education. I fell into using the same language I have used for hundreds of other students over the years. I was offering the same sorts of justifications that were used on me as a biochemistry major in the 1990s when I was told…
March 28, 2023
Blog

Why Faculty Need to Go Back to School: A Modern Viewpoint

It is a truism in higher education, especially at liberal-arts institutions, that interdisciplinary collaboration promotes academic excellence—that it forms well-rounded students and fosters communities of intellectual creativity. We want our students to combine ideas from multiple disciplines in order to be critical and flexible thinkers. They should study philosophy and literature so that they can…