Skip to main content
BlogEditor's Preface

Introducing the Winter 2025 Issue of CSR

Pulling together each Christian Scholar’s Review issue is a labor of love and a labor-intensive team effort. Usually, at the end of my prefaces, I thank one of our transitioning team members, but I’m not sure how many people make it to the end of my quarterly missives. So, this time around, I start with…
March 11, 2025
Blog

Teaching About Racial Colorblindness: Some Strategies, Struggles, and Confessions

As someone who teaches about the psychological pitfalls of racial colorblindness, it’s been jolting to see this ideology being touted as an ideal way of relating to one another. For example, President Trump has repeatedly used this term, including during his inauguration speech. Recently, against the backdrop of the current public sentiments about racial colorblindness,…
March 10, 2025
Blog

Rethinking the Promotion of Adaptation in the University

Like most college professors in this Year of our Lord 2025, I sometimes think about what I would do if my position got the axe. I never come up with any good ideas, and my institution is relatively healthy, so I usually just let it go and get on with my work. Tomorrow will take…
March 7, 2025
Blog

Creating and Redeeming Institutions: A Christian Approach

“All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.” Rousseau, Emile, Book 1 In the last decade, politicians, academics, and activists have called for abolishing various institutions (e.g., “abolish the police,” “abolish USAID”). These calls emerge out of the declining trust in almost every institution, which is at a historic low for particular institutions…
March 6, 2025
Blog

How The Age of AI Makes Christian Colleges More Valuable

“I can learn anything from AI now – why spend four years at a Christian college?” A high school senior asked me this question recently, his phone displaying ChatGPT’s impressive analysis of his calculus homework. It’s a question that echoes in living rooms across the country as families weigh the value of higher education against…
March 5, 2025
Blog

Strength in Christ’s Body

Praising Athletic Excellence In the early 20th century, physical culturist Bernarr Macfadden wrote a paean to praise the glory of humanity. His hymn of the gym—titled “Manhood Glorified”—was to be hailed, he said, “with majesty”: The world resounds, demanding human glory The cry for health prevails throughout the land While grovling through life’s mire Seeth…
March 4, 2025

Subscribe

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

Blog

Guest Post – The Work of (Y)our Hands

This post is dedicated to my mother, Deborah Elizabeth Mitchell (née Vestal), whose faith, hope, and love will always sustain me. Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. –Isaiah 64:8 Growing up, my mom, née Vestal, would sometimes remind me…
January 6, 2022
Blog

Interview with a Recent College Grad: Rebecca Olsen

Interview with a Recent College Grad: Rebecca Olsen A lot has changed in the world and for college students since I went to college long ago. Even over the course of three decades of teaching college students, I’ve observed that students today attend college for different reasons, face different obstacles in working toward their degrees,…
January 5, 2022
Blog

Review: Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism.

The thesis of this monograph is captured nicely by its subtitle: Christian convictions and motivations both energized and obstructed the crusade to end slavery in the United States. Although in its essence the author’s thesis is not novel—the realization that opponents and defenders of bondage both wielded religious arguments is commonplace—Wright offers a provocative analysis…
January 4, 2022
Blog

The Heart of Christmas

The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ… And He shall reign for ever and ever… King of kings, and Lord of lords. These familiar words from the Hallelujah chorus come at the climax Handel’s Messiah. An apocryphal story tells of how King George II was so…
December 21, 2021
Blog

Guest Post – Scorsese’s Christmas Story

After weeks of shooting footage at a town nearby for his latest project, legendary director Martin Scorsese has finally wrapped up filming. This Advent marks the tenth anniversary of another work of Scorsese’s and my favorite Christmas movie: his Oscar-winning Hugo (2011). Although neither Santas nor Scrooges, neither mangers nor mistletoe appear in the film,…
December 20, 2021
Blog

Advent Meditation IV: Tender

Fra Angelico, The Nativity, Basilica di San Marco, Florence, 1441, https://www.wikiart.org/en/fra-angelico/nativity-1441 It is very difficult, today, for the ordinary, defensive and suspicious human being to understand Christ’s radical vulnerability, from his conception to his death on a cross. However, the mysterious Fra Angelico (literally, “the Angelic Friar”), a Renaissance painter who also happened to be a renowned…
December 17, 2021
Blog

Guest Post – Reflections for Graduates from The Little Prince Part 2

A version of this full essay—offered here as a two-part blog—was initially presented by Biola University Associate Professor, Jane E. Kim, at the commencement ceremony for the Torrey Honors College on May 10, 2019. Please see yesterday’s post for Part 1. Secret Number Three: Only those to whom you give yourself become yours. During his…
December 16, 2021
Blog

Guest Post–Reflections for Graduates from The Little Prince: Part 1

A version of this full essay—offered here as a two-part blog—was initially presented by Biola University Associate Professor, Jane E. Kim, at the commencement ceremony for the Torrey Honors College on May 10, 2019. It has become something of a tradition in my program for faculty to draw from children’s books in sharing words of…
December 15, 2021
Blog

Library Trends and the Future of Christian Scholarship

I have been concerned for quite some time that works of Christian scholarship are not ideally accessible in the marketplace of ideas. Early in my career, I documented that evangelical literature was often not available digitally, and I advocated for publishers and others to address such deficiencies.Gregory A. Smith, “Christian Libraries for the Next Generation:…
December 14, 2021
Blog

The Meaning of Dreams: Creation Through Selection

Sidarta Ribeiro, in The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams, has written a book that artfully blends multiple disciplines of human experience, from sociology to biochemistry, in pursuit of its fundamental question: Why do we dream? Ribeiro argues against the scientific “default” interpretation that dreams are random firings of neurons without meaning.…
December 13, 2021