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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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Loving to Know: Faith, Librarianship, and Epistemology

While there are many ways to integrate faith into a discipline, some scholars argue that faith integration into any academic discipline should begin with the presuppositions which undergird that discipline. In some disciplines, presuppositions (and their impacts upon the discipline) are evident. For example, if I presuppose that there is a good and loving God…
August 10, 2022
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Another Way In: “Near-Death Experiences” as an Apologetic

Maria was dead. The hospital staff worked heroically to save her, but the heart attack was just too severe. Somehow, though, Maria saw the whole resuscitation process from above. She saw something else, too, as she drifted from the room. A tennis shoe: Third floor of the hospital, on an outside window ledge. Maria would…
August 9, 2022
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Introducing Christian Scholar’s Review’s Summer Themed Issue: Conviction, Civility, and Christian Witness

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. This famous poem by Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Yeats captures the anxieties he felt as he scanned the social horizon of his day. The forces…
August 8, 2022
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Did Abraham Pass the Test?

I made many mistakes in my oral qualifying exam, halfway through grad school. The first was probably that I wore a double-breasted blazer at least 5 years out of style, as a committee member noted at the beginning. More substantial was the fact that I stumbled over explaining my collaborator’s techniques to the committee, one…
August 5, 2022
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Dead Bodies in Pretty Clothes

In my role as an Art History professor at Seattle Pacific University, I have accompanied students to Rome, Italy six times. We stay there for about a month, visiting umpteen million churches, in addition to wonderful museums, grand palazzos, and major archaeological sites. Among these sites, the churches are the real treasures - pedagogically, artistically,…
August 4, 2022
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Helping GenZ Do Science: Cultivating the Written Word

“This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you.’” - Jeremiah 30:2 (NIV) I remember as a college freshman seeing a cartoon taped on the door of one of the physics labs in Cornelia Hall at Iona College. It showed a student…
August 3, 2022
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Supervising Internships with an Emphasis on Vocation and Calling

If your campus is anything like mine, there has been an increasing emphasis on students completing internships during their time in college or university. A decade or two ago, students completing one internship were ahead of many of their peers, while today, many students are completing multiple internships. At my institution, there has been increasing…
August 2, 2022
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On Christian Self-Care

This year it finally hit me. I’ve been going about self-care all wrong. I have been thorough in my pursuit of self-care practices that would chip away at the weight of professional responsibilities that comes with overseeing the needs of between 360 and 2,700 students (depending on my on-call schedule). I’ve added stretch breaks and…
July 29, 2022