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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

Guest Post: Lived Religion and Sports

Lived religion Today’s elite athletes have much at stake in sports.  Climbing up the rankings within youth, collegiate and professional sports is no doubt daunting, where the victor has the best chance of advancing and everybody will seemingly do whatever it takes to win.  Competition can produce uncertainty and anxiety in the lives of athletes,…
June 21, 2021
Blog

A National Experiment in Ignoring Fathers

Betrayed. That’s how Olga, an education official responsible for moral upbringing in the Soviet Ministry of Education, felt after the downfall of communism. In an interview five years later, she shared with me her devastation: For many years, I had been sure that I was doing exactly what is needed. I was horrified when I…
June 18, 2021
Blog

If a Tree Falls on a Campus, Does It Make Any Sense?

In the space of about a year, three big trees fell in middle of the Seattle Pacific University campus. All of these were close to the Tiffany Loop, where we hold an “Ivy Cutting” graduation ceremony under the canopy of branches every June (when weather and pandemics permit). Each time a tree fell, I’d remember…
Blog

Guest Post: On Wolterstorff on Kant, Part I: On Fallibility

I recently had occasion to read one of the more obscure publications by one of the more famous Christian philosophers of our time, Nicholas Wolterstorff. An article he first presented as a conference paper at Calvin College (now University) in 2000 is currently available in the handsomely produced two-volume series of Wolterstorff works edited by…
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Student Characteristics: Chasing the 99

As a journal editor, I intermittently see articles submitted that choose as their rhetorical opening some generalization, often alarmist, about “today’s students” and their supposed challenges or deficiencies. As someone who is regularly involved in providing professional development on the topic of teaching and learning, I also sometimes get asked to provide input on the…
June 11, 2021
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The Fortress of Christian Higher Education

Decades ago, when I informed an acquaintance that I had accepted a tenure-track position at a Christian college, he shifted his eyes awkwardly before smiling out, “Sounds like a nice place to send my daughters.” I repeat the appalling comment—appalling on many different levels—in order to contrast it with a different kind of parental approach…
June 10, 2021
Blog

Chronological Snob No More

I have recently realized that, despite my best intentions, I am guilty of chronological snobbery. It is a humbling—but helpful—understanding. It has helped me to make sense out of my own bewilderment over these past few years. Let me explain. I teach British literature, specializing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (but like most professors,…