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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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Star Shake, Glass Break, All to the Good

In the mythology of modern art, there are a few old chestnuts that get repeated again and again. There is the time Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear and then bore witness through confessional portraiture. There is the time Pablo Picasso unveiled his first masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and declared it an “exorcism.” (For…
October 21, 2022
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A Few Words in Favor of Reticence

Reticence is not much of western virtue. In Shakespeare's King Lear, the words of Edgar, son of the Earl of Gloucester, to “speak as we feel, not what we ought to say” illustrate the tragic cost of withholding one’s authentic thoughts and feelings toward others and perhaps even more tragically from oneself. After all, pulling…
October 20, 2022
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Can Christian Higher Education Stay the Course?

Not far from our home in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is one of southern Ontario's premier universities, McMaster, known internationally as a centre for advanced scientific and medical research. What few remember is that the university once had a connection with the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Québec, the only remnant of which is the presence…
October 13, 2022
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Author’s Response to Jenell Paris’ Review of Strangers and Scapegoats, Extending God’s Welcome to Those on the Margins

Strangers and Scapegoats is the culmination of some 20 years of my learning to think sociologically while teaching undergraduate students to cultivate their own sociological imaginations. The concept of imagination—of perceiving old things in new ways—plays a central role in the book, and is, for me, key to addressing the perennial problem of the stranger.…
October 11, 2022
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C.S. Lewis On Atomic Theory and the Cross of Christ

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” Proverbs 25:2 (ESV)  In Europe, at the turn of the twentieth century, great advances were being made in atomic theory. In 1904, the British physicist and Nobel laureate Sir Joseph John Thomson, who had discovered the…
October 7, 2022
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Humility in Sports: Reflections on Excellence and Performance

In the Oscar award-winning film, Chariots of Fire (1981),Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson (20th Century Fox, 1981). the father of the famous Scottish athlete, rugby player and missionary, Eric Liddle, exhorts his son to follow his love of sport and seek excellence and success, in stating that “… you can praise the Lord…
October 6, 2022