Skip to main content
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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

Subscribe

for new content notifications, access to video and audio conversations with our writers, and invitations to our events.

Blog

Guest Post – What’s in a Name?

My husband and I are called by nicknames from our middle names. Needless to say, this can make for some confusing, if not frustrating, moments when legal documents are involved to prove that this is indeed the real me. However, the upside is I immediately know if it’s a salesperson on the phone if they…
June 30, 2022
BlogBook Review

Book Review – Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy

Perhaps the first thing to say about Adam Stern’s book is that it demonstrates deep erudition and analytical capability in the author’s quest to interrogate the concept of survival in a theological and political sense. Stern carries out his exercise primarily through interaction with texts by the Jewish scholars Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig,…
June 28, 2022
Blog

Fleeing from Quarrels toward Creole

(Curtiss DeYoung (lead author) and contributing authors Jacqueline J. Lewis, Micky ScottBey Jones, Robyn Afrik, Sarah Thompson Nahar, Sindy Morales Garcia, and ‘Iwalani Ka’ai,  Becoming Like Creoles: Living and Leading at the Intersections of Injustice, Culture, and Religion Fortress Press, 2019). In 1 Timothy, Paul warns against “unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words…
June 24, 2022
Blog

Guest Post – Resisting the Tyranny of Immediacy: Cultivating Patience in Digital Spaces

In Western culture, and especially in America, patience is rarely considered a virtue. Increasingly, we celebrate impetuosity. The punchline of a recent New Balance commercial, for example, is “impatience is a virtue.” This tactic is ostensibly deployed for marketing purposes—mere hyperbole meant to highlight that company’s corporate social responsibility initiatives (i.e., when it comes to…
June 23, 2022
Blog

Fatherlessness, Whether Chosen or Not, Is Still a Tragedy 

Take up the cause of the fatherless.Isaiah 1:17 America currently has the largest percentage of children raised without two parents in the world (23% compared to 7% for the rest of the world). We also have the highest-ever number of children living without fathers in America (same web source). Our children and society will experience the…
June 17, 2022
Blog

Teaching with the End in Mind

I earned my master’s degree as a single mother while working full time. It was as intense as it sounds. Once or twice a week for about two years, I’d leave work and immediately drive an hour east to my night classes at the closest state university. Afterward, I’d get home around 10:00, stay up…
June 16, 2022