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Public Sociology and Anthropology: Moving Toward Things That Smell (Part 1)

Note: Presidential Address to the Christian Sociological Association and the Network of Christian Anthropologists at their Joint Conference at Covenant College, June, 2024 This past Christmas, while visiting relatives, most of our family—my spouse Joan, daughter Rose, and son Alec—took a train from Hammond, Indiana into Chicago.  After an enjoyable day walking around Millennium Park,…
August 25, 2025
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What Is a Christian Understanding and Measure of Not Belonging?

"The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.”                                Lev. 25:23 One of the popular topics and measures in higher education these days concerns belonging. My simple database search turned up over 600 academic journal articles on the subject over the past few…
August 22, 2025
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Explore the Christian Scholar’s Review Summer 2025 Book Reviews

As a companion to yesterday’s blog introducing our summer articles, today we turn to our book review section, curated by our book review editor, Matt Lundberg—Calvin University’s director of the de Vries Institute for Global Faculty Development and professor of Religion. While we publish many excellent standalone reviews, the second part of each journal offers…
August 21, 2025
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Explore the Christian Scholar’s Review Summer 2025 Articles

This summer, we reached a milestone of over 550 manuscripts submitted to Christian Scholar’s Review since we introduced our online manuscript management system five years ago. It seems incredible (and a lifetime ago) that we were tracking manuscripts, reviewers, reviews, revisions, decisions, and correspondence with a very wonky spreadsheet. I offer that number with some…
August 20, 2025
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Time for Self-Sacrificial Leadership in the Christian University World

Many universities in America are experiencing difficult times. The combination of enrollment declines and operating cost increases has pushed some universities beyond their ability to adapt. A growing number of institutions suffering financial exigency have either closed or been merged into more economically healthy university systems.Evan Castillo and Lyss Welding. 2025. “Tracking College Closures and…
August 18, 2025
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Mother Wounds

When I was a young professor, before I had children of my own, I found myself getting too emotionally entangled with my students. I don’t think I violated students’ boundaries or did anything intrusive. I was too constitutionally timid for that. But I DID take my students’ problems home with me at night, identifying with…
August 14, 2025

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Addressing Reductionistic “Nothing but” Scholarship: The Conversation around a New Definition of “Evangelical,” Part 1

Christian scholars interested in Christ-animated learning have long observed that one major danger to such scholarship is reductionism. George Marsden helpfully summarized the problem in his book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, “Once we have a convincing explanation at the level of empirically researched connections we are inclined to think we have a complete…
May 27, 2025
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Intellectual Pilgrimage: Christians in the Contemporary Academy

The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship became an instant classic when it was released by Oxford University Press in 1997, but I must admit that I always disliked the title. While it is an effective attention-­grabber, the text itself is far more nuanced and polite than the title presages. Additionally, the word “outrageous” conveys neither…
May 22, 2025
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Catholic vs. Protestant

“In the one Christ, we are one.”                                          -motto of Pope Leo XIV The Catholic Church has recently elected a new pope, not quite three weeks after the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday. Meanwhile, I have been thinking about Christian education in the city of Seattle, where I teach at a Protestant university…
May 21, 2025
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Renaissance Man: Charlie Peacock’s Memoir Drives Deep into Evangelicalism’s Historic Twentieth-Century Turn

A real renaissance is hard to come by. No birth is easy, let alone a rebirth. But that’s what American evangelicals experienced—that’s what they accomplished—from the mid-twentieth century through the opening decades of the twenty first: renaissance. Joel Carpenter describes the initial stirrings of this vast movement, in the aftermath of the 1925 Scopes Trial, with…
May 19, 2025
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The Anxious Generation: A Christian Educator’s Reflection: Part II

In "The Anxious Generation: A Christian Educator’s Reflection," I explored insights from Jonathan Haidt's book from a Christian perspective. I specifically paralleled the rise of anxiety among young people with the concepts of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, demonstrating how these themes could enrich Haidt’s analysis. In his book, Haidt offers a way to reverse…
May 15, 2025