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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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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life, Part II: Love

Yesterday’s post unpacked the problematic character of modern positivist Christian conceptualization and prioritization of truth. Though truth undoubtably matters enormously, it was proposed that absolute truth about metaphysical matters is not attainable, that assertions of propositional truth claims are prone to exercising power and producing interpersonal alienation, and that in profound experiential (not necessarily epistemological)…
April 15, 2025

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Guest Post – Evolutionary theodicies, humility, and hope

My path as a Christian paleontologist has been a journey. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it has been marked by peril, especially since I’ve never lost my faith, but it has certainly involved many stumbling blocks along the way. During my years as an undergraduate student at what is now Calvin University, I became increasingly…
January 31, 2022
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Guest Post – Learning from a Black Evangelical’s Challenge to America’s Social Justice Movement

In Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, Pastor and Cultural Apologist Voddie Baucham takes up what he believes to be the most important discussion for the contemporary church:  social justice.Voddie Baucham, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe (Salem Books, 2021) In late June 2021, shortly after the…
January 27, 2022
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Technology and the Opening Chapters of Genesis

In the opening chapter of Genesis, God speaks the words “Let there be,” producing a dazzling variety of creatures, each “according to their kind.” At first glance, the creation story seems to speak only of the natural world—of skies and seas, fish and birds, stars, and planets. What might technology have to do with the…
January 26, 2022
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Truth and Healing in the Church After Sex Abuse

After two decades of intensive revelations, the wounds from priestly sex abuse in the Catholic Church in the United States remain vastly unhealed. Most enduringly, thousands of survivors of abuse remain wounded spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, and relationally. The ripple effects have wounded their families and communities on an exponential scale and have weakened trust among…
January 25, 2022
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Guest Post – Grading: What’s Love Got to do With It?

In her recent CSR blog post (November 18, 2021), Marybeth Baggett invited professors to reconsider their grading practices through the lens of spiritual disciplines, guided by Richard Foster’s influential book, Celebration of Discipline. Baggett’s essay argued that grading student work, while a necessary part of teachers’ “mundane” work, can be rejuvenated when understood as an…
January 24, 2022
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Ahmaud Arbery and the (Im)possibility of Justice

In his book Specters of Marx, French philosopher Jacques Derrida observes that time is always “out of joint.” Citing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he notes that Hamlet’s tragedy arises from his mission to right a wrong that can never present itself, a crime that is always in the past. The disjunction of crime and correction is ever present in the…
January 21, 2022