Picture Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_The_Risen_Christ_Appearing_to_Mary_Magdalen_-_WGA19094.jpg We were flying east across the Atlantic Ocean, anticipating our overnight stop in Amsterdam, and were soon attracted by an interesting message on the headrest in front of us. It announced a celebration of the 400th anniversary year of Rembrandt van Rijn’s birth! Might it be possible for us to join the…

I recently learned about the term, “goblin mode.”I would like to thank Professor David Tizzard for introducing the terms goblin mode and godsaeng to me. If you are also hearing this phrase for the first time, it refers to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way…

Let’s start with my least favorite part of this book: its title. To be fair, it is my least favorite part because this book serves as an excellent example of robust Christian reflection on technology and the specific challenges of particular professional fields. While people in those professional fields will find the book most immediately…

Last fall semester, Beth Madison posted on the CSR blog about vulnerability in the classroom—a vulnerability on the part of professors that could lead to openness from students, and ultimately growth toward wholeness. I’d like to look at the issue of vulnerability from a different angle—that of students’ vulnerability in the classroom—and consider some of…

Baylor University recently published a land acknowledgment (LA). A few other Christian institutions and conferences have also created them (see for example here, here, and here). According to the Baylor University link, “A Land Acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many Native Nations and communities. Today, land acknowledgments are used by Native…

I had my first MRI ever just a few months after my 24th birthday. Two days later, I’d undergo an emergency craniotomy to remove as much as possible of a baseball-sized tumor that had, unbeknownst to me, been slowly invading my otherwise healthy brain. I soon received my diagnosis: brain cancer, the slow growing sort…at…

One of the first things I did as editor of this journal (CSR) was commission a review of church historian Mark Noll’s excellent and challenging book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind which was first published in 1994 by Eerdmans and now, again, with new material in 2022. That review was by Gordon College professor…

Sometime in the next few weeks, it will be the third anniversary of the moment when each of us realized that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 would not remain isolated to Asia and a couple of cruise ships but was bearing down across the globe. On March 10th, 2020, I shrugged off The Atlantic article titled…

John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Huguenot,_on_St._Bartholomew%27s_Day In 1852, the pious British artist John Everett Millais (who has been featured elsewhere in this blog), painted a heart-rending image called A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day. Here, beside an ivied wall, two young lovers furtively embrace. The air is thick and the…

During focus group research for the book Digital Life Together, two secondary school students offered the following reflections about what happens when their teachers assign reading tasks: we'll ask , "can we skim it and just look for the answers?" And they're, like, "No, I actually want you to read it".  … One of my…