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Faith and Learning as a Life of Pilgrimage: A Response to Joseph Clair

We appreciate Professor Clair’s impassioned review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage. At the beginning of his piece, he nicely summarizes the book, noting its historical awareness; its sensitivity to Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal perspectives; and its analysis of America’s evolving intellectual ecosystem. Clair identifies the notion of pilgrimage as a central…
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Toward the City: Rethinking the Pilgrimage Metaphor for Faith and Learning–A Review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage

In their latest installment chronicling the relationship between religion and American higher education, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen turn to the constructive task of offering a novel and hopeful model of faith and learning suited to the present moment. Rather than remain entrenched in the enclosed ghettos of polarizing and identity-­constrained thinking, “pilgrim thinking”…
February 23, 2026
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The Poisonwood Bible: Revisiting a Barbara Kingsolver Bestseller

When it was first published in 1998, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, not only became a bestseller but was even selected by Oprah’s Book Club. And it still holds a special place in many people’s lives all these years later. When people are asked which books have meant the most to them, they often…
February 19, 2026
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The Purpose of Teaching

I sometimes wonder what I want to achieve with my students. When I started teaching in 2000, at the mature age of 23, I primarily taught for the pleasure of teaching. I also did it to help students acquire the knowledge required by the course and subsequent courses. At that time, I taught C++ programming,…
February 18, 2026
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Wombs, Tombs, and the “Wonderful Things” of God

My wife and I recently returned from a visit to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. George Vanderbilt, grandson of the famed shipping and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, envisioned and constructed his family’s palatial Southern Appalachian home in the late nineteenthcentury. Inspired by the Châteauesque architectural style of France and England, the 250-room Biltmore…
February 16, 2026

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Introducing the Christian Scholar’s Review Winter Issue

Sometime in the next few weeks, it will be the third anniversary of the moment when each of us realized that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 would not remain isolated to Asia and a couple of cruise ships but was bearing down across the globe. On March 10th, 2020, I shrugged off The Atlantic article titled…
February 15, 2023
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Kiss of Death

John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Huguenot,_on_St._Bartholomew%27s_Day In 1852, the pious British artist John Everett Millais (who has been featured elsewhere in this blog), painted a heart-rending image called A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day. Here, beside an ivied wall, two young lovers furtively embrace. The air is thick and the…
February 14, 2023
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Here’s Your Assignment

During focus group research for the book Digital Life Together, two secondary school students offered the following reflections about what happens when their teachers assign reading tasks: we'll ask , "can we skim it and just look for the answers?" And they're, like, "No, I actually want you to read it".  … One of my…
February 13, 2023
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Sacramental Vision as Faith Integration*

“It is a triumph of science to have, in some degree, described the electron, and preposterous to suggest is has been explained.” —Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things Faith integration is a task integral to the vocation of Christian education. It’s become a buzzword and identity marker: good Christian education means robust faith integration. Faith…
February 10, 2023
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A Catholic among Protestants

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, I belong to a Roman Catholic family that went to Mass every Sunday, prayed the rosary every day during the month of October to honor Mary, the mother of Jesus, and went to pre-dawn Mass during the Advent season before Christmas. My brothers were altar servers and my parents…
February 8, 2023
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The Pedagogy of Improv

For Christmas 2021, my wife got me the gift of improv comedy classes. We happen to have an improv comedy theater right here in our little Chicago suburb, and she signed me up for a Level 1 class. She says I brought up the idea at some point—I certainly don’t remember doing that—but I was…
February 6, 2023
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ChatGPT and the Turing Test: Biblical Studies Version

My inventive colleague, Dr. Isaac Soon, recently offered a constructive counterpart to all the handwringing in academia about ChatGPT. Instead of bemoaning ChatGPT’s potential to mimic student papers for fear of widespread cheating, why not use ChatGPT as a teaching and research tool? Isaac put up on his weblog a process he could supervise, as…
February 3, 2023