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 – The Inferno: Sport as a Test of Courage?

'My teacher, what are these cries I hear?Who are all these people conquered by their pain?'And he to me: 'This state of miseryIs clutched by those sad souls whose works in lifeMerited neither praise nor infamy.' Dante Alighieri, Inferno. Trans. Anthony Esolen. (New York: Random House, 2002), Canto III, 32-36. The Divine Comedy is among the…
April 18, 2022
Blog

Missing Good Friday: Forgetting to Teach Forgiveness

But then, how can a man be virtuous without God?  That’s the snag and I always come back to it.Mitya in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brother’s KaramazovFyodor Dostoevsky, Brother’s Karamazov, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). Can you imagine a culture that does not teach the virtue of forgiveness?  Actually, I found one conducting my doctoral…
April 15, 2022
Blog

Guest Post – The Sins of Evangelicalism’s Past: Collective Repentance and the Question of History

The 2016 election of Donald Trump with 80% of the white evangelical vote has generated intense consternation about the identity of “evangelicalism”: the character of its constituents, its fragmentation according to political leanings, whether the term remains usable as a theological descriptor, given its partisan connotations. A related discussion has arisen concerning the history of…
April 14, 2022
Blog

Guest Post – A Third Way Regarding Identity

In early February 2022, American Reformer published a provocative article by Caleb Morell titled “Stop Finding Your Identity in Christ.” Morell first notes the prevalence of this “identity in Christ” phrase in Christian literature, explaining that this language “exploded in the 1980s, particularly as Christians began borrowing this emerging term from secular psychology.” In the…
April 13, 2022
Blog

Art and Ashes: Finding the True Human Condition

Everything is compromised. Nothing is worthy. Strip it down, strip it down. Take off the sugar-coating, the veneer, the gilding, the velour, and what is left? Nothing. Emptiness. Posing, pretending, preening, delusion.  Those of us who love – truly love – sometimes feel like the prey of shadowy hunters. We are huddled together for safety…
April 12, 2022
Blog

Guest Post – The Postures of Lament in the Classroom

The greatest commandment God has given us is to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength. And the second is like it, to love our neighbor as ourselves. Christian education, therefore, should help students and teachers alike become people who love God and love their neighbors more through the…
April 8, 2022
Blog

Christian Education for Librarianship, Part 4: Four Additional Issues

Throughout this series, I have explored the logic of a Christian university offering a graduate program to prepare librarians for service in a Christian college or university setting. I began by arguing that librarianship is value-laden and thus subject to examination from a Christian perspective. In my second post, I reviewed programs in library and…
April 7, 2022