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Public Sociology and Anthropology: Moving Toward Things That Smell (Part 1)

Note: Presidential Address to the Christian Sociological Association and the Network of Christian Anthropologists at their Joint Conference at Covenant College, June, 2024 This past Christmas, while visiting relatives, most of our family—my spouse Joan, daughter Rose, and son Alec—took a train from Hammond, Indiana into Chicago.  After an enjoyable day walking around Millennium Park,…
August 25, 2025
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What Is a Christian Understanding and Measure of Not Belonging?

"The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.”                                Lev. 25:23 One of the popular topics and measures in higher education these days concerns belonging. My simple database search turned up over 600 academic journal articles on the subject over the past few…
August 22, 2025
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Explore the Christian Scholar’s Review Summer 2025 Book Reviews

As a companion to yesterday’s blog introducing our summer articles, today we turn to our book review section, curated by our book review editor, Matt Lundberg—Calvin University’s director of the de Vries Institute for Global Faculty Development and professor of Religion. While we publish many excellent standalone reviews, the second part of each journal offers…
August 21, 2025
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Explore the Christian Scholar’s Review Summer 2025 Articles

This summer, we reached a milestone of over 550 manuscripts submitted to Christian Scholar’s Review since we introduced our online manuscript management system five years ago. It seems incredible (and a lifetime ago) that we were tracking manuscripts, reviewers, reviews, revisions, decisions, and correspondence with a very wonky spreadsheet. I offer that number with some…
August 20, 2025
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Time for Self-Sacrificial Leadership in the Christian University World

Many universities in America are experiencing difficult times. The combination of enrollment declines and operating cost increases has pushed some universities beyond their ability to adapt. A growing number of institutions suffering financial exigency have either closed or been merged into more economically healthy university systems.Evan Castillo and Lyss Welding. 2025. “Tracking College Closures and…
August 18, 2025
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Mother Wounds

When I was a young professor, before I had children of my own, I found myself getting too emotionally entangled with my students. I don’t think I violated students’ boundaries or did anything intrusive. I was too constitutionally timid for that. But I DID take my students’ problems home with me at night, identifying with…
August 14, 2025

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Bringing Cultural Context to the Foreign Language Classroom and/or Introducing Culture (to a GenEd Curriculum) via Food

“companion” (n.)c. 1300, "one who accompanies or associates with another," from Old French compagnon "fellow, mate, friend, partner" (12c.), from Late Latin companionem (nominative companio), literally "bread fellow, messmate," from Latin com "with, together" (see com-) + panis "bread."Online Etymological Dictionary, “Companion,” (Etymonline.com, 2024), http://www.etymonline.com/search?q=companion. Enrollment in world language courses has seen a sharp decline in recent years.Kingson, Jennifer A. “College Students Bid…
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A Pope Who Doubts?

“Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance... If there was only certainty and no doubt , there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope that doubts.” So implores Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, compellingly played by Ralph…
May 9, 2025
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The Joys and Perils of Silence: Lessons from Counseling

In my Counseling Theory & Practice class for undergraduate psychology students, the first skills practice session focuses on the reflection of feelings. As such, many of the guidelines for this session spotlight what to say and how to say it. For example, I provide students with a list of “feeling” words to add to their…
May 7, 2025
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Are We Educating Intellectual Wrestlers? Not with Chat GPT  

Religious institutions of higher education often distinguish themselves from their secular counterparts in terms of something called “purpose.” Sometimes the idea is that the two kinds have different purposes; sometimes it’s that one is purposeful in a way that the other is not (as in the argument that “secular” means trying to be “neutral” between…
May 5, 2025
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Seeing, and Understanding

“They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, ‘Do you see anything?’ He looked up and…
April 30, 2025
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Rediscovering Meaning

Outside the friendly confines of the CSR blogosphere, society is fragmenting (or perhaps you could say it is fragmented). Truth itself seems increasingly privatized and tribal, adrift in a sea of relativism, subjective interpretations, and bold-faced lies. Political debates have intensified into existential wars, revealing a culture that feels not merely divided, but antagonistic, hateful,…
April 29, 2025
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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