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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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A Typology of Christian Discipleship Methods, Part 1

Followers of Jesus are to be leaders in disciple-making. At home, at work, in school, in church, anywhere really, it is nothing less than what the scriptures invite us to do with our lives: Be disciples and make disciples. In fact, the word μαθητής (mathetes) appears more than 250 times in the New Testament, meaning…
January 5, 2023
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Warm and Fuzzy and Strange

This December, in her Language Arts class, my fifth grader is retelling the Christmas story. And she can’t just write any old, kid-style paraphrase. Instead, my daughter’s story has to be from the vantage of a minor, or even invisible, character. What, my daughter must consider, did the Nativity look like to the overlooked? Well,…
December 19, 2022
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Attention and Adoration: An Advent Reflection

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. -Simon Weil We have an attention problem. It’s easy to blame modern media technologies. Many have done so, and I regularly join their lament. The field of media ecology is ripe with insights about technology’s effects on our ability to purposefully attend to…
December 16, 2022
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Joy (not Happiness) to the World

Tis the season for joy. In our best-loved Christmas hymns, the angels announce the birth of Jesus with glad tidings of great joy. In reply and echoing their joyous strains, we sing lustily and with good courage that God has sent joy to the world. Even the fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains cannot…
December 15, 2022
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The Importance of Eye Contact

I once heard a preacher deliver a sermon on Jesus’ encounter, in Mark 10, with “the rich young ruler.” I have heard many sermons on that story, but never before any like this one. The preacher chose to focus on verse 21, where it says that Jesus looked at the young man. Much of the…
December 14, 2022
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Share the Story of Chanukah With Your Students This Christmas

"Then came the Feast of Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was in the Temple area walking in Solomon's Colonnade" – John 10:22-23 Beginning with their enslavement in Egypt, when Pharaoh ordered Hebrew midwives to murder all newborn Jewish males, throughout Israel's exile and captivity under the Babylonians and the Assyrians, to this…
December 13, 2022
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Students as Image Bearers of God: Preparing for the First Day of Class

“Recognition is the first human quest.” Andy Crouch begins his latest book with this statement and then expands on our desires to be recognized as persons—individuals who have a place in this world. In The Life We’re Looking for: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, Crouch suggests that technology has not succeeded in promoting true…
December 12, 2022
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Am I a House Divided?

My dissertation and early scholarly research focused on investigating the issue of work-religion conflict (WRC). WRC is a specific type of inter-role conflict whereby the role pressures associated with one’s work and religion domains are perceived, in some respects, as being incompatible with one another. A man of faith who often comes to my mind…
December 6, 2022