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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

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Blog

Advent Meditation I: St. Hildegard and the Cyclical Song of Angels

(Choirs of Angels, Scivias I.6, https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/hildegard-von-bingen/scivias-i.6-the-choirs-of-angels/) Among medieval Catholic saints (think Catherine of Siena, Anthony of Padua or Joan of Arc), Hildegard of Bingen is one of the most palatable to modern tastes. She was not prone to shocking self-mortifications; she was not embroiled in muddy political disputes; and she has not been subjected to…
November 26, 2021
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Guest Post – The Pilgrims’ “First Thanksgiving” Was Not the One We Remember

Today millions of Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving, and some, at least, will find a historical precedent for what they are doing in the Pilgrims’ celebration on the coast of Massachusetts in 1621. Although frequently embellished and sometimes caricatured, the story of the Pilgrims’ “First Thanksgiving” is rich with insight and inspiration. The Pilgrims were human,…
November 24, 2021
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Guest Post – Utility of a Higher Order

This article first appeared in Current. Love of God and neighbor are at stake in the battles over liberal learning  In his journal entries for September 8 and 9, 1960, the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton explores the importance of “being able to rethink thoughts that were fundamental to people of other ages, or…
November 22, 2021
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Grading as Spiritual Discipline

Here’s an open secret: professors do not go into teaching for the grading. Cliché, I know, but for most of us, grading is the necessary cost of doing what we love: leading lively discussions, preparing thought-provoking lectures, writing ground-breaking books or articles, and mentoring students. Grading, on the other hand, is just, well, grating—at least…
November 18, 2021
Blog

Judging King Kong by its Cover: The Aping of Beauty

When visitors enter the museum at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, which archives work about and by C.S. Lewis and six of his British influencers, they are treated to an eye-popping display of 53 book covers from famous works: The Two Towers from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Lewis’s Perelandra, Sayers’s first Lord Peter…
November 17, 2021
Blog

Guest Post – Do We Want to Support Women?

Editor’s Note:  Dr. Reynolds’ post is part of a once a week series we have been doing on the recent book, Power Women: Stories of Faith, Motherhood, and the Academy. You can find previous posts here, here, here, here, and here. The recent CSR series on the book Power Women, as well as the book itself,…
November 16, 2021
Blog

Guest Post – Campus Eating

When our son moved into a dormitory as a Calvin College student in the 1980s I had already been on the faculty there for fifteen years. But suddenly I experienced the campus in new ways. I had known all along, of course, that there were dormitories, parties, various student services, and the like. But that…
November 15, 2021