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Preliminary Thoughts on Sport, Theology, and Trauma (Part 3): Theological and Psychological Perspectives on Trauma

Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger, emerita professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of Spiritual Trauma Care: Theology and Psychology in Dialogue, is one of America’s leading pastoral theologians. Her latest book brings the latest trauma theory and empirical findings into conversation with Christian theology. Hunsinger states that the “overriding purpose of the book is to…
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Preliminary Thoughts on Sport, Theology, and Trauma (Part 2): Social-­Scientific and Methodological Perspectives on Researching Trauma in Sports

Our review of the literature yielded no publications specifically on a theological and psychological understanding of trauma in sports, aside from an interview with Rachael Denhollander and a book and two articles that touch on trauma-­related issues in sports from a Christian perspective (e.g., resilience and identity). There are several publications from the fields of…
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Echoes of the Genuinely Human

During my “tween” years, I devoured novels about Christian boys of my age. For example, I read most, if not all, of the Moody Press thirty-six-volume series about the Sugar Creek Gang, a group of boys who encouraged each other in maintaining their shared Christian identity. Even though I am grateful for the “wholesome” image…
July 27, 2026
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Christian Higher Education at a Crossroads

Ron Highfield's The Christian University and the Academic Establishment arrives at a particularly fraught moment in the history of American higher education. Confidence in the university as an institution has eroded dramatically. Political polarization has drawn colleges and universities into broader cultural conflicts. Debates over academic freedom, diversity initiatives, institutional mission, free speech, and ideological…
July 23, 2026

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What Does Christianity Have to Do with Economics? Three Approaches

Since most faculty are trained in thoroughly secular universities and disciplines, it can take some work to figure out what difference Christian faith can have in the practice of your discipline. I have noticed that there is a particular difficulty of this kind for economists. In this blog post, I describe the background for that…
Steven McMullen Headshot
July 2, 2024
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Personifying Prudence: The Face(s) of Wisdom

Wisdom often feels like a vague, shadowy concept—something we all want but do not really understand. Sometimes we equate wisdom with intelligence, but it certainly is not guaranteed by a high IQ. Sometimes we talk about wisdom as if it were a synonym for inner peace or an automatic characteristic gained from old age or…
June 25, 2024
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Making Virtue Personal, Part 1

My students rarely know what kindness really means. When they provide feedback on their classmates’ papers, for instance, they think kindness means happy faces and exclamation marks, and a “Great Job!” written at the end. And they often think people like me, who offer them substantial critiques to help make their writing better, are simply…
June 24, 2024
BlogBook Review

Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age.

One exercise on political partisanship I enjoy doing with my classes is to read out a list of words and phrases while the students work together to classify them as either red or blue—Republican or Democrat. It starts off simply with broad groups in the population: the students all “know” that farmers are red while…
June 20, 2024
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In Defense of Those Who Work and Build, Part 2

In yesterday’s post, I showed how the Victorian Thomas Carlyle, though a strong critic of the Industrial Revolution, defended work as a good and godly thing. In this post, I shall extend my analysis to two other Victorians who also balanced a critique of the excesses of industrialism with a celebration of our God-given call…
June 19, 2024
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In Defense of Those Who Work and Build, Part 1

Our academic age celebrates the critic more than the creator. One finds this represented in our most discussed theory of the past few decades—critical theory. Contemporary academics tend to look with suspicion upon entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. This academic tendency is not unusual for this age though. Academic critics during the Industrial Revolution exhibited…
June 18, 2024
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Stewarding Our Bodies: Less Than a Dozen Christian Colleges Give Catalogue Evidence of Teaching Health and Human Performance Gen Eds Christianly

This past year I wrote about the bodily stewardship crisis on Christian campuses. In a national survey of student affairs leaders, I noted that our research team asked them to rank sixteen themes they might emphasize on their campus. Educating students about stewardship of the body finished dead last. The second most neglected topic was…
June 17, 2024