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Toward the City: A Final Response to the Jacobsens

I am grateful for the generous response of the authors to my review. I appreciate their clarification of the book’s overarching aim: to provide “a framework that increases the capacity of all scholars—whether biologists or poets, accountants or artists, nurses or philosophers—to recognize that faith intertwines with every aspect of their intellectual work,” and to…
February 25, 2026
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Faith and Learning as a Life of Pilgrimage: A Response to Joseph Clair

We appreciate Professor Clair’s impassioned review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage. At the beginning of his piece, he nicely summarizes the book, noting its historical awareness; its sensitivity to Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal perspectives; and its analysis of America’s evolving intellectual ecosystem. Clair identifies the notion of pilgrimage as a central…
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Toward the City: Rethinking the Pilgrimage Metaphor for Faith and Learning–A Review of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage

In their latest installment chronicling the relationship between religion and American higher education, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen turn to the constructive task of offering a novel and hopeful model of faith and learning suited to the present moment. Rather than remain entrenched in the enclosed ghettos of polarizing and identity-­constrained thinking, “pilgrim thinking”…
February 23, 2026
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The Poisonwood Bible: Revisiting a Barbara Kingsolver Bestseller

When it was first published in 1998, Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, The Poisonwood Bible, not only became a bestseller but was even selected by Oprah’s Book Club. And it still holds a special place in many people’s lives all these years later. When people are asked which books have meant the most to them, they often…
February 19, 2026
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The Purpose of Teaching

I sometimes wonder what I want to achieve with my students. When I started teaching in 2000, at the mature age of 23, I primarily taught for the pleasure of teaching. I also did it to help students acquire the knowledge required by the course and subsequent courses. At that time, I taught C++ programming,…
February 18, 2026

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Guest Post – The Inferno: Sport as a Test of Courage?

'My teacher, what are these cries I hear?Who are all these people conquered by their pain?'And he to me: 'This state of miseryIs clutched by those sad souls whose works in lifeMerited neither praise nor infamy.' Dante Alighieri, Inferno. Trans. Anthony Esolen. (New York: Random House, 2002), Canto III, 32-36. The Divine Comedy is among the…
April 18, 2022
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Missing Good Friday: Forgetting to Teach Forgiveness

But then, how can a man be virtuous without God?  That’s the snag and I always come back to it.Mitya in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brother’s KaramazovFyodor Dostoevsky, Brother’s Karamazov, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). Can you imagine a culture that does not teach the virtue of forgiveness?  Actually, I found one conducting my doctoral…
April 15, 2022
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Guest Post – The Sins of Evangelicalism’s Past: Collective Repentance and the Question of History

The 2016 election of Donald Trump with 80% of the white evangelical vote has generated intense consternation about the identity of “evangelicalism”: the character of its constituents, its fragmentation according to political leanings, whether the term remains usable as a theological descriptor, given its partisan connotations. A related discussion has arisen concerning the history of…
April 14, 2022
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Guest Post – A Third Way Regarding Identity

In early February 2022, American Reformer published a provocative article by Caleb Morell titled “Stop Finding Your Identity in Christ.” Morell first notes the prevalence of this “identity in Christ” phrase in Christian literature, explaining that this language “exploded in the 1980s, particularly as Christians began borrowing this emerging term from secular psychology.” In the…
April 13, 2022
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Art and Ashes: Finding the True Human Condition

Everything is compromised. Nothing is worthy. Strip it down, strip it down. Take off the sugar-coating, the veneer, the gilding, the velour, and what is left? Nothing. Emptiness. Posing, pretending, preening, delusion.  Those of us who love – truly love – sometimes feel like the prey of shadowy hunters. We are huddled together for safety…
April 12, 2022
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Guest Post – The Postures of Lament in the Classroom

The greatest commandment God has given us is to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength. And the second is like it, to love our neighbor as ourselves. Christian education, therefore, should help students and teachers alike become people who love God and love their neighbors more through the…
April 8, 2022
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Christian Education for Librarianship, Part 4: Four Additional Issues

Throughout this series, I have explored the logic of a Christian university offering a graduate program to prepare librarians for service in a Christian college or university setting. I began by arguing that librarianship is value-laden and thus subject to examination from a Christian perspective. In my second post, I reviewed programs in library and…
April 7, 2022