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How Coaching Youth Sports Helped My Thinking about Christian Character

The most important activity that helped refine my view of character education was not taking classes on epistemology and ethics from Dallas Willard. Nor was it taking all my other Ph.D. classes that addressed virtue or moral development. It was coaching youth league sports. Granted, readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology led me to recognize…
June 25, 2025
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AI and the Grammar of Descent

Recently, there’s been even more press than usual about AI proliferation and its associated risks. The hype has been driven, in part, by the now infamous Ross Douthat interview with Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the A.I. Futures Project, in which Kokotajlo suggests that AI could take over civilization—and “then kill all the humans”—by 2027.…
June 24, 2025
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God Made All Nations from One Blood: The Origins of a Biblical Argument against Slavery

In 1526, William Tyndale’s ground-breaking translation of the English New Testament appeared. In this translation, Tyndale used a unique phrase that was not in John Wycliffe’s original English translation. Instead of translating a key passage from Paul’s sermon to the Athenians in Wycliffe’s original way, “ made of one all the kind of men” (Acts…
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Mirrors Transformed by Light:Meditations on the God Who Is Light

I’d like to propose a thought experiment -- one that may transform your understanding of something you see every day. Thought experiments can change the world, or at least your understanding of it. Einstein’s great scientific breakthroughs started with a thought experiment, something like this one. For our experiment, imagine how a mirror works. If…

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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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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life, Part III: Persons

The first post in this series pondered problematic modern Christian conceptions of truth, and the second pondered prescribed classic Christian practices of love, arguing for its priority. The focus in both was not on compelling truths about God, nor virtuous love of God or nature. Instead, the conundrum was what Christians believe to be true…
April 16, 2025
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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life, Part II: Love

Yesterday’s post unpacked the problematic character of modern positivist Christian conceptualization and prioritization of truth. Though truth undoubtably matters enormously, it was proposed that absolute truth about metaphysical matters is not attainable, that assertions of propositional truth claims are prone to exercising power and producing interpersonal alienation, and that in profound experiential (not necessarily epistemological)…
April 15, 2025
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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life

Part I: Truth My colleague had just finished delivering a public lecture on the challenge that intersex persons—those born with a mix of male and female organs, chromosomes, and hormones—present to the church. A perturbed member of the audience was expressing his disapproval of her call for the Christian church to understand, affirm, and welcome…
April 14, 2025
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Christian Reflections on Vibe Coding

If you follow trends in software engineering, you may have encountered the term “vibe coding,” recently popularized by Andrej Karpathy, deep learning researcher and OpenAI co-founder.Kevin, R. (2025, February 27). Not a Coder? With A.I., Just Having an Idea Can Be Enough. New York Times. This is how he defines the approach: There’s a new kind…
April 11, 2025