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Rediscovering Meaning

Outside the friendly confines of the CSR blogosphere, society is fragmenting (or perhaps you could say it is fragmented). Truth itself seems increasingly privatized and tribal, adrift in a sea of relativism, subjective interpretations, and bold-faced lies. Political debates have intensified into existential wars, revealing a culture that feels not merely divided, but antagonistic, hateful,…
April 29, 2025
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Bad Daddy

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière - WGA11837 - Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière - Wikipedia The French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a beautiful embalmer of royalty. His paintings of emperors and aristocrats are as ravishing as they are uncanny, with their rubbery limbs, elongated necks and bovine eyes. His portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere,…
April 28, 2025
BlogReviews

An Extended Review of Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

Harold Laswell famously defined politics as “who gets what, when, and how.” These decisions are surely as fraught now as they were when Aristotle wrote about politics in ancient Athens. Politics has always been about power: who has the power to determine who gets what, when, and how? When it comes to power, Christians live…
April 25, 2025
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Love for Truth: Pondering Dennis Hiebert’s Love-First Epistemology.

In the fundamentalist churches of my childhood, propositional truths were weapons of spiritual warfare, wielded to help your friends and harm your enemies. Propositional truths held the community together, and they held the world at bay. Disagreements about propositional truths split all three of the churches my family attended before I went off to college.…
April 24, 2025
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“When in the Boat Together” ft. the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities’ David A. Hoag I Saturdays at Seven – Special Episode

In this special episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with David A. Hoag, President of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Hoag opens by discussing the investments Christian colleges and universities make in fostering relationship between faith and learning and how the CCCU is prepared to increase efforts…
April 23, 2025

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Blog

The Pedagogy of Improv

For Christmas 2021, my wife got me the gift of improv comedy classes. We happen to have an improv comedy theater right here in our little Chicago suburb, and she signed me up for a Level 1 class. She says I brought up the idea at some point—I certainly don’t remember doing that—but I was…
February 6, 2023
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ChatGPT and the Turing Test: Biblical Studies Version

My inventive colleague, Dr. Isaac Soon, recently offered a constructive counterpart to all the handwringing in academia about ChatGPT. Instead of bemoaning ChatGPT’s potential to mimic student papers for fear of widespread cheating, why not use ChatGPT as a teaching and research tool? Isaac put up on his weblog a process he could supervise, as…
February 3, 2023
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Teacher Dispositions: The Mind, Heart, and Soul of Servant Leadership

When I began reading Servant Teaching—Practices for Renewing Christian Higher Education, by Quintin Schultze, I felt like I had discovered a priceless jewel for which countless educators had searched for decades. Schultze addresses, with grace and humility, the theme of teacher dispositions. And, he does not just dance around the topic of character-based leadership, as…
January 31, 2023
Blog

Whither Christian Civility?

In 2017, a group of about forty Christian communication scholars convened at Spring Arbor University to participate in a dialogical mini-conference on “Civility and Virtue in a Multicultural Public Sphere.” A year and a half into the presidency of Donald Trump, our conversations kept turning to the plague of incivility in our national discourse and…
January 30, 2023
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A Christian Reflection on Religious and Secular Iconoclasm

“So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship….” (Acts 17:22-23) Across my newsfeeds recently has come news of an “Exceptional trove of 24 ancient statues found immersed in…
January 27, 2023
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Book Review – Witness at the Cross: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Friday

I double-checked the title; was “witness” singular or plural? With the answer—singular—the book’s thesis became crystal clear. Amy-Jill Levine invites each reader to be a witness, a witness to arguably one of the most monumental events in history, the death of Jesus of Nazareth. She lays bare each ancient witness’s actions and testimony, and encourages…
January 26, 2023
Blog

Loving the Aliens: Building from a Strong Foundation (Part Three)

Developing a solid biblical foundation on the issue of multicultural ministry is essential if we are to have any meaningful discussion on how best to respond to undocumented workers. If God desires to bring to Himself a multiethnic community that will best reflect His glory, then we should be doing everything we can until then…
January 25, 2023
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Loving the Aliens: A Biblical Theology of Multiculturalism (Part Two)

To faithfully respond to a specific issue (like undocumented workers in America), we need to take a step back and see a bigger picture of God’s work as revealed in God’s Word. While the issue of undocumented workers touches on several topics (political, legal, economic, etc.), at its heart, talking about undocumented workers is about…
January 24, 2023