Skip to main content
Blog

Legal Scholarship for the Kingdom

The primary claims of the first edition of George Marsden’s book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, remain as salient and persuasive as they were thirty years ago: First, Christian academics may—I will argue should—be doing their scholarship from a Christian point of view (more shortly on what that might mean in practice), and second,…
May 30, 2025
Blog

Building the Future of Christian Scholarship

The first edition of George Marsden’s book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship appeared the same year I completed my doctorate. I eagerly read it and it immediately became a touchstone book for my early career. And so, it was with great enthusiasm that I began reading the second edition. How have the ideas aged?…
May 29, 2025
Blog

Addressing Reductionistic “Nothing but” Scholarship: The Conversation around a New Definition of “Evangelical,” Part 2

I remember teaching a weekend course on American Christian history in the late 1990s. Since it was a weekend course for working adults, I used several videos in those late Saturday afternoon hours when eyes glazed and heads nodded. I found some great videos about the history of American Catholicism and African American Christianity, but…
May 28, 2025
Blog

Addressing Reductionistic “Nothing but” Scholarship: The Conversation around a New Definition of “Evangelical,” Part 1

Christian scholars interested in Christ-animated learning have long observed that one major danger to such scholarship is reductionism. George Marsden helpfully summarized the problem in his book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, “Once we have a convincing explanation at the level of empirically researched connections we are inclined to think we have a complete…
May 27, 2025

Subscribe

for new content notifications, access to video and audio conversations with our writers, and invitations to our events.

Blog

Reclaiming the Power of Words

Ellen Seidman is on a crusade. Her efforts have caught the attention of thousands of YouTube viewers, educators, 250,000 petition signers, and even past presidents such as President Obama. Her crusade doesn’t focus on ending poverty, racism, global warming, or sex trafficking. Her crusade is to end the use of a single word. Seidman and…
July 9, 2021
Blog

Is Faith Required for Mathematics?

"Hey, I heard somewhere that you wrote a book about math and your faith. Having never understood how a rational person can possibly subscribe to the Christian dogma (except for having some strong, over-riding subconscious need, perhaps), I'm curious about it, although if it all comes down to ‘faith,’ well, I've never had any idea…
July 8, 2021
Blog

Filling the Well When the Water Runs Dry

The lackluster Department of Labor April jobs report took just about everyone by surprise: the US economy showed a net increase of only 266,000 nonfarm jobs. With the country opening up after the winter’s lockdowns, some estimates projected that the total would be closer to a million new jobs.  Did this mean that the economy…
July 7, 2021
Blog

Earth Has a Pulse, Scientists Say

If you follow the latest science news, whether it’s a newsfeed from Science Daily or a casual listen to Ira Flatow on Friday afternoons, you may have learned that Earth, indeed, has a pulse. As reported in the journal Geoscience Frontiers, rigorous statistical analysis for the timing of 89 major geological events of the past…
July 6, 2021
Blog

Reading George Marsden with Gen Z

Each spring semester for the past twenty-odd years I have assigned the same essay to my junior-level history majors at the Christian college where I teach. In it historian George Marsden navigates the complex relationship between personal faith commitments and serious academic scholarship, laying out what I believe numbers among the most compelling visions for…
July 2, 2021
Blog

Sanctuary

Professional art historians are among the luckiest of God’s children. Our vocations consist in the study and praise of beautiful things. If we are fortunate to have an academic job, we can use the summer months to travel and discover even more beauty - and count this useful, as well! So it was that I…
July 1, 2021
Blog

Guest Post – Deconversion: The All-Or-Nothing Fallacy

It seems that not a month goes by without a well-known Christian announcing on social media that they have left the faith. More troubling, but less sensational is that for each celebrity deconversion there are hundreds of unknown believers who deconvert that don’t get the headlines. Deconversion from Christianity is a growing and troubling trend.…
June 30, 2021
Blog

Guest Post: General Systems Theory for a Kinder, Gentler World

“Ship, Then Test” That phrase headlines a section from entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, and engineers would call these fighting words.Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything (New York: Penguin Group, 2004) Yet many businesspeople would nod in agreement with the thought.In all fairness,…
June 29, 2021
Blog

Theo-Drama and Mise-en-Scéne

In my current book project, The Wages of Cinema: Looking through the Lens of Dorothy L. Sayers, I argue that full appreciation for the relationship between Christianity and film necessitates knowledge about the history of theater: a word that comes from the Greek “to see.” Seeing the medium, whether on stage or screen, echoes one…
June 28, 2021
Blog

“The Reservoir From Which We Need to Drink”: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae

Forty years ago Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory unexpectedly became a touchstone text, one that scholars across disciplines read with unusual urgency.  In the midst of the postmodern turn, MacIntyre served notice that modernity’s increasingly evident deficits—cultural, political, and intellectual—might be fruitfully addressed by arguments stemming from ontologies believed by many, perhaps most, to…
June 25, 2021