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Grounded: God in the Dirt

Starting around the year 1400, a new kind of Nativity Scene began to grace European art – and Italian Renaissance art, particularly. Before, Nativity scenes often featured Mary holding a swaddled baby Jesus and surrounded by animals and worshippers in a stable. The new formula, however, showed the baby Jesus lying naked on the ground,…
December 17, 2024
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REINDEER GAMES

Imagine a single snowflake—albeit a giant one that encompasses 196,880+ dimensions. That’s the word-picture used by Mark Ronan to describe “the monster,” an extraordinarily large, complex numerical entity discovered by mathematicians in their hunt for mathematical symmetries, and one that may shed light on the deep structure of the cosmos itself.Mark Ronan, Symmetry and the…
December 16, 2024
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Theological Foundations for Creation Care: Replacing Apathy and Despair with Hope and Christian Virtues — A Review Essay (Part 2)

Contra to Spencer’s demand for orthodoxy, Creation Care Discipleship commits a chapter to “Ecumenical Insights,” drawing on wisdom from representative socially conscious Christian lineages. Providing a brief overview of denominational contributions, Chapter 4 leads with the visions of Pope Francis, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I, and Lutheran ethicist Paul Santmire. Bouma-­Prediger carefully selects generally applicable…
December 12, 2024
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Theological Foundations for Creation Care: Replacing Apathy and Despair with Hope and Christian Virtues — A Review Essay (Part 1)

Andrew J. Spencer’s and Steven Bouma-­Prediger’s recent releases applying Christian theology to contemporary environmental problems share similar goals and face common constraints. As trade paperbacks, both books are intended to motivate an indifferent or skeptical Christian readership and theologically equip students to address hot-­button political topics. The authors self-­identify as Evangelical, utilize the language of…
December 11, 2024
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Shaping Witnesses: Baylor’s English Graduate Program

In the past year or so, six graduates of Baylor University’s English graduate program have published books about the arts of reading well and the value of forming Christian imaginations. Jessica Hooten Wilson (grad of 2009) published Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Jessica has also published several…
December 10, 2024
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Sharing Our Screens

Recently I re-watched The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man, played by Jim Carey, who discovers that his life has been broadcast to the world as a reality TV show. Though produced a quarter of a century ago, the movie’s critique of an “always-on,” surveillant media culture felt timely and spoke to my…
December 9, 2024

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Insecurity, Skepticism toward Science, and Christian Environmental Leadership

Since the U.S. environmental movement gained momentum in the 1960s, religious scholars and cultural critics have periodically portrayed Christianity as the progenitor of the worst of the Anthropocene. Rather than grouch about culture wars or academic one-upmanship, however, it is ethically more constructive to grapple with Christian failures in providing leaders capable of unraveling “wicked…
March 17, 2021
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Introducing Timefulness

 According to Big Bang cosmology, time began at the moment of creation, along with energy, matter and space as constrained by the elegant equation E=mc2. Twentieth century astrophysicists quantified the expanse and duration of the cosmos. However, geologists were ahead of them on the duration thing by introducing the concept of deep time in the…
March 16, 2021
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Armor, literal and figurative: On Pontius Pilate and the Artist Raphael

In 1505, the Renaissance artist Raphael Sanzio lavished his skill on a subject rather out-of-date: the legendary dragon slayer St. George, an early Christian saint generally associated with the martial and chivalric spirit of the Crusades. In his large painting of the subject at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the holy warrior…
March 15, 2021
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Advising Students and Discerning Direction

The student who sat in front of me was having difficulty looking me in the eyes as he shuffled his hands. He slowly began to speak. He was a second-year engineering student having second thoughts about his chosen field of study. He knew he liked being creative, but he was becoming increasingly convinced that his…
March 11, 2021
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Guest Post: Why I am Abandoning Online Test Monitoring

Dear friends, I have decided to stop using the online test monitoring system.  I had felt conflicted about it throughout the semester last fall, because I was not convinced that it would prevent cheating and suspected it could worsen equity issues. Now I am finally abandoning it because it is bad for my soul and erodes…
March 10, 2021
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Enjoying the Bible?

I’m particularly thrilled to interview Matthew Mullins (Twitter: @MullinsMattR) this month, not only because his book Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures (Baker Academic 2021) is such a timely and insightful book, but also because Matt is my colleague at The College at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary where he serves as Associate…
March 9, 2021
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The Last Acceptable Prejudice

There’s been an ongoing, race-to-the-bottom-like debate about what actually constitutes the “last acceptable prejudice” in mainstream culture. Among a list of contenders, I want to focus on one that has been suggested elsewhere—a bias toward rural America and rural Americans. I highlight this bias, not because I have particular empirical support for it, although much…
March 5, 2021