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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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The Meaning of Technology

The book of Genesis opens with the creation account describing a beautiful world of sea, earth, sky, plants, fish, birds and other animals. And then God places a human in the garden. Immediately following this part of the story is a curious verse, which at first seems out of place. The verse is Genesis 2:12,…
October 8, 2021
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Responding to Student Excuses with the Wisdom of Solomon

These years are rough, no doubt, with both students and faculty altering daily life in order to survive the pandemic—and grieving those who didn’t. While many challenges are novel, and hopefully temporary, one is perennial: the student excuse. Faculty may see student excuses as annoying time-drains that divert from the real work of education and…
October 7, 2021
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Shouting at Your Neighbor: Why We Bother with Other People’s Languages

This essay was published in 2012 in the book Practically Human: College Professors Speak from the Heart of Humanities Education edited by Gary Schmidt & Matthew Walhout (Grand Rapids: Calvin College Press, 2012, 133-145). It asks why we invest time and resources in learning other languages and seeks to look further than pragmatic motivations based…
October 6, 2021
BlogReviews

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Joseph Henrich’s big, impressive, and fun book should appeal to scholars across a broad spectrum. Historians, sociologists, economists, church historians, psychologists, cultural historians, and educators will find much to ponder and process in The WEIRDest People in the World. Henrich tells the story not of how the West was won, but how it was born.…
October 5, 2021
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How Professional Ethics Secularizes Moral Thinking

Any professor using a popular professional ethics textbook in their class is likely secularizing the moral thinking of their students. To help you understand why that is the case, I want to outline briefly the history and reemergence of professional ethics and then sketch the nature of most common professional ethics texts. A Brief History…
October 1, 2021
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Science as a Discipline of Contemplation?

Editor’s Note: The following blog post is provided by Professor Tom McLeish from his 2021 Boyle Lectures.  The full version of his lecture was recently published in Zygon together with a response by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, an article by Fraser Watts summarizing the panel discussion, and a second article by Professor McLeish…
September 29, 2021
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Reconsidering Power

It’s almost three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. I’m trying to finish up a bit of writing while constantly keeping an eye on the top right-hand corner of my computer screen. Three o’clock is right when my daughter’s school day ends. Readers of Power Women might very well recognize these words. They are taken almost…
September 28, 2021
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“Power Women” and the Professoriate

Growing up in a small New England town, I had a friend whose mother, a professor who taught at a private, religious college in the Berkshires, abruptly began dying her hair ash-brown when she was applying for tenure. I was bewildered and asked my friend, why? I thought gray hair was a sign of wisdom—a…
September 27, 2021
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Guest Post: Relating a Gospel

Some years ago I had the privilege of presenting a brief devotional session in a Catholic institute where I was undertaking some language study. The chosen theme was the Parousia: the resurrected King coming in power. The descriptions that were used came primarily from Revelation and contrasted rather markedly with the iconography surrounding us in…
September 24, 2021