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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

Why Would I Be a Mentor?

The utility of providing mentors to early career professionals is widely recognized. Many businesses encourage them with established formal mentoring programs. Many universities do the same, assigning incoming faculty and staff to more experienced counterparts to assist in their onboarding. The exact relationship between the “mentor” and “mentee,” however, comes in a wide variety of…
January 9, 2023
Blog

A Typology of Christian Discipleship Methods, Part 2

What are the disciple-making options for churches, schools, and others committed to facilitating the spiritual growth process? Part 1 of this series offered five methods from throughout church history. Here in Part 2, I share four more historical methods, followed by a suggestion for integrating these time-honored approaches into a comprehensive discipleship model that is…
January 6, 2023
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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