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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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