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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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Resisting the Allure of the Collectivism-Individualism Dichotomy in the Classroom: Han as an Example

“And this is explained by collectivism…” I cringe inside every time it occurs. During a presentation or classroom discussion, a student will articulate a cultural difference and follow up with an explanation that, with a certain degree of finality, labels the observed difference as a result of collectivistic or individualistic (C-I) cultures. But the elaboration…
November 8, 2021
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Guest Post – The Gift of Motherhood

Editor’s Note: Prof. Ndethiu’s post is part of a series of blog posts on the recently published book: Power Women: Stories of Faith, Motherhood, and the Academy. You can find previous posts here, here, here, and here. Motherhood is a profound gift. I was immensely privileged to have the most wonderful biological mother, and then…
November 3, 2021
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Guest Post – “De-Centering Whiteness” Pedagogy and the Both/And of the Image of God

In a senior-level course, I require students to read primary texts that many find a stretch in a conservative Christian university. Texts include articles and chapters by a scholar promoting Marxism—James Berlin; a radical black lesbian feminist—bell hooks; a leading voice of post-structuralism—Michel Foucault, and a French academic who was a friend of Derrida and…
November 2, 2021
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Fiftieth Anniversary Book Reviews

Thomas Molnar’s review of Albert Camus and Christianity by Jean Onimus (University of Alabama Press, 1970) was CSR’s first book review. The final review of its first 50 years was T. M. Moore’s look at The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). In the intervening decades, CSR has…
October 29, 2021
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Exploring Manifold Beauty in Genesis 1

A recent lectionary reading in my church from Hebrews contained a phrase that never struck me before as very important. The letter opens with, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways…” In various ways! The same afternoon, I read a pertinent quote by Duke theologian Ellen…
October 27, 2021
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Guest Post: Reflections on scholarship, motherhood, and faith after more than a year of pandemic living

Looking over my chapter“Divvying up Love: Scholarly Ambition and Motherhood as Spiritual Formation” in Power Women: Stories of Motherhood, Faith, and the Academy, eds. Nancy Wang Yuen and Deshonna Collier-Goubil (Downers Grove, IL: 2021), pp.11-26. again from Power Women: Stories of Faith, Motherhood, and the Academy induced a set of mixed feelings. On the one…
October 26, 2021
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Taking a Truce on Our Conflict

I was in a heated cell phone discussion with my older brother—a man who loves the Lord, is in full-time ministry, and regularly leads Bible studies at local prisons. However, we were talking politics and our raised voices reflected our deep differences. For us, the issues that made the 2020 presidential election contentious still carry…
October 25, 2021