Annoyed by plump plastic Santas perched on suburban lawns, I was suddenly struck by the relevance of my scholarship to cultural conceptions of Christmas. In my November CSR blog, I discussed the need for Christians to avoid an “economy of exchange” in their vocabularies about salvation, and this time of year we can’t help but…

Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth!  So begins the most acclaimed moment in the most acclaimed Christmas oratorio ever written.This post is adapted from William S. Brewbaker III, “Government For the Time Being,” in Austin Sarat, ed., Legal Responses to Religious Practices in the United States: Accommodation and Its Limits (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012),…

One of the clearest conclusions we can take away from the 2020 election season is that political and ideological polarization has continued to be one of the most powerful forces in our social life. In recent days, I have seen a variety of calls for us to come together as a people, or as a…

In the early centuries after Christ, myriad heresies peeled free of the doctrinal core, curling attractively, then blanching and withering. They were like eddies swirling off a current, spiraling prettily and then dissipating. Or like whorls of smoke from a pipe. Such things were attractive precisely in their divergence from the core. They were Life…

The work of a Christian scholar is bound to the questions of the Christian community, those questions that rise up from the “fear and trembling” by which all Christians work out their salvation and whose answers, however incomplete, form the basis of the account of the hope that is in us all. This means that…

This semester seems to be ending in stages. We planned to send students home at Thanksgiving and teach the remainder of the semester online. Then a spike in COVID infections in the wider population and a state shutdown of schools and universities in response pulled us out of the classroom a week early. Some semesters…

I used to ask this question as a student. It took me a while to get to know the University staff who were Christians. I was aware of pressing ethical issues and controversial questions about science and the Bible; I knew science was a demanding career that might compete with church commitments; I knew some…

For Christians, most virtue words do not actually describe virtues unless they are directed properly. To put one’s faith, hope, or love in the wrong being or thing is actually a vice and not a virtue. That’s why when attempting to measure Christian virtue, it is always hard to find appropriate psychological scales. Hope in…

Jesus the Great Philosopher: Recovering the Wisdom for the Good Life by Jonathan T. Pennington, Associate Professor of New Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was released last month by Brazos Press. It’s a book that will appeal to a variety of readers, from students to professors, from theologians to philosophers, from Christians…

In the early eighties I was a junior at a large research university in British Columbia. One quiet Friday evening, in the century old residence hall, a friend and I were sitting in the empty hallway while she tried to teach me how to play poker. About an hour into her unsuccessful attempts, she leaned…