Editor’s Note: The William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company releases an updated edition of Mark A. Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind today.  Reflecting upon that book’s longstanding influence, Indiana Wesleyan University’s President David Wright offers this morning’s post, focusing on the impact Noll’s book had since its original release in 1994, his hopes for…

I may have Ronald Reagan to thank for my marriage. During the spring of 1995, I visited the Russian city of Kostroma to continue my dissertation research that involved visiting 17 Russian and Ukrainian cities. During that visit, I ended up going to a Russian Orthodox Easter service out in a small country church. The all night…

An odd little book was amongst the cascading vendor enticements at last month’s educational gathering in Dallas, TX. From Walter Kim and Bryan Stephenson to Adelle Banks and Michelle Boorstein, the  Council of Christian Colleges and Universities’ International Forum produced a stellar lineup for its 1100 attendees—and they proved every bit as engaging as their…

In the last post, I shared how the biblical doctrine of judgment stabilized my own spiritual imbalances and insecurities, thus welcoming me, a sinner, into the presence of a righteous God who treated me better than I deserved. I shared Hamilton’s scholarship, showing God’s glory as revealed in this salvific work of judgment as THE…

Jesus’ healing of the blind must rank amongst the more perplexing stories in the Bible. Jesus spits on the ground and makes a mud-saliva mix to rub on a man’s eyes then tells him to go wash in a pool (John 9:6–7). In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus gives the blind man at Bethsaida the same mud-spit…

What role should faith play in Christian education? This philosophical question regularly results in divisive dialogue in certain scholarly circles and—for newly minted faculty—instills a degree of confusion around the gravity of the issue. Under the weight of the school year, it grows easier to jettison this all-important question as pursuing the right funding, pedagogy,…

We were aboard the Fyodor Dostoevsky, in port on the Moscow River, just after returning from an early morning visit to Red Square, where we had been puzzled by why it was completely devoid of visitors. Our guide, Natasha, had queried a lone soldier who said it had been cleared for a movie production. As…

Editor’s Note: In light of Ash Wednesday and this time of repentance, confession, and lament before Easter, we will be hosting once a week posts on the theme of lament. Around the time of the Great Recession, wildfires were burning in the county where I lived in Southern California. In the early autumn, the Santa Ana…

When I was a teenager, I remember hearing the question “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? At the time, I thought, “What a stupid question—of course it makes a sound.” But the longer I teach science, and the more I learn about…

With today’s blog, I am pleased to introduce the Winter issue of Christian Scholar’s Review. As I write this, there’s not much winter left in the Pacific Northwest with the crocuses in bloom and hummingbirds fliting across my study’s window. But as has been the case with so much of our cattywampus pandemic lives, the…