Skip to main content
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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

Subscribe

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

Blog

The Social Dilemma

A recent Netflix documentary titled The Social Dilemma interviews several engineers who had helped build social media platforms, but who are now sounding the alarm on their creations. The film features prominent designers from Google, Facebook, and Twitter, including the engineer who created the pervasive “like” button and the inventor of the “infinite scroll.” The…
February 18, 2021
Blog

For Ash Wednesday: On Clean Pain

It’s Ash Wednesday, a time of repentance, and I’m put in mind of an artist of sorrow. Rogier van der Weyden, a 15th-century Netherlandish genius, was known for many things (including an audacious portrait of himself as a saint), See https://collections.mfa.org/objects/31035  but his paintings of Christ’s death are his most profound. They are almost unrivaled…
February 17, 2021
Blog

From Thick to Quick: Living the Golden Rule

After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in July 2020, I participated in a BLM protest in Harrisburg, PA. I brought along my copy of The Souls of Black Folk by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois. I sat on a step of the State Capitol and read, aloud but quietly, the eleventh…
February 15, 2021
Blog

Defamiliarizing Christianity

“Christ Animated Learning” is an inspired title for this blog, for Christ the Logos (“word, thought, rationality”) is always the one who animates (from Latin anima, “spirit, breath of life”) the journey toward Truth that we call “learning.”  The same Spirit who effected my conversion to Classics as a college sophomore, immersing me in the…
February 11, 2021
Blog

Bodies, Beauty and Time: On Michelangelo

Contemporary culture is obsessed with the human body. It (that is, the body) carries so much responsibility. Weak, mortal, finite, it is made to bear burdens of eternity: it is made to be a sign of dignity, meaning and status that is somehow eternal. So, we punish it, whipping it into shape with brutal exercises.…
February 10, 2021
Blog

Identity Excellence and Not Identity Politics Should Be Our End

Although I am a college professor, I must confess that my most important education during college did not come from professors. As an undergraduate majoring in history, political science, and religion at Rice University, I had some great classes with outstanding professors—one even won a Professor of the Year award among faculty for the entire…
February 9, 2021
Blog

Changing Faces on Freedom of Religion or Belief

A mere four years – something of a lifetime – ago, the Berkley Center asked many scholars and activists to offer advice for the new administration of President Trump. At the time, I argued that the new administration needed to leverage its multilateral assets: that freedom of religion or belief needed American leadership, but that…
February 8, 2021
Blog

“Just the Answer, Please”

Deep into the throes of last semester—at that juncture when I invariably lose the pedagogical forest for the trees—I noticed a reoccurring discussion across each of my classes. While my courses focus uniquely on topics such as analyzing social welfare policies, child welfare practices, and grant writing—one pressing and underlying question kept emerging. That is,…
February 5, 2021