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When Judgment Hurts

Last month, I attended a conference at Calvin University focused on how to counter reductionism in teaching and education. Certainly, our culture has been in thrall to reductionist tendencies for some time, as the angry, dismissive tone of internet culture and political discourse shows us. Sadly, this tone often makes its way into the classroom,…
November 18, 2024
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“Is it Wrong to Mourn What You Do Not Know?” On Satisfaction and the End of Learning

Many faculty professional development days, hallway dialogues between colleagues, and programs for the integration of faith and learning exist because of the common question: how can we motivate our students to desire learning? Although scaffolded course objectives and early alert systems for struggling students are designed with the ostensible end of effective teaching in mind,…
November 15, 2024
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An Extended Review of The Artistic Sphere: The Arts in Neo-­Calvinist Perspective (Part 2)

The words of Calvinists like Kuyper on the one hand, and secular “formalists” like Greenberg on the other, can sometimes seem interchangeable. However, Kuyper and Greenberg would certainly have disagreed concerning the “area of competence” contained in the “Artistic Sphere.” For Kuyper (and for Rookmaaker, who worked out Kuyper’s ideas through art criticism) the artist…
November 14, 2024
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The Real Problem with Chatbot Personas: In Response to Derek Schuurman

Derek Schuurman rightly warns against the use of chatbot “personas,” which are created by configuring a program like ChatGPT to respond in the style of a particular person. For Schuurman, the problem is that using these services encourages “ontological confusion” – by interacting with a computer as if it is a human being, “we run…
November 11, 2024

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Toward a Christian Film Aesthetic

As co-director of the Marion E. Wade Center, the world’s most comprehensive archive of books and autographs by and about C. S. Lewis and six of his most important influencers, I have delighted in reading unpublished correspondence and manuscripts by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), whose radio plays about Jesus nurtured Lewis’s spiritual life. Among the many…
September 14, 2020
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What does Christianity have to do with Economics? Three Approaches

Since most faculty are trained in thoroughly secular universities and disciplines, it can take some work to figure out what difference Christian faith can have in the practice of your discipline. I have noticed that there is a particular difficulty of this kind for economists. In this blog post, I describe the background for that…
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September 11, 2020
BlogPress Release

Welcome to the Christ Animating Learning Blog

Christian Scholar’s Review is pleased to announce the launch of “Christ Animating Learning”—an interdisciplinary and interactive forum focused on the relationship the Christian faith shares with the practices of teaching and scholarship.  “Christ Animating Learning” launched Monday, with posts appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Readers can access it at https://christianscholars.com/blog/ or sign-up at https://christianscholars.com/newsletter/…
September 9, 2020
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Consider the Snail: Teaching Online and Learning to Breathe

Snails, it turns out, have things to teach us, even for folk with advanced degrees. Things that could be relevant to an online course. Things that carry a faint echo of wisdom’s laughter at the delights of creation, as narrated in Proverbs 8. Things that also have to do with how we use technology for…
September 8, 2020
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Teaching Culture in Covidtide

A new school year is beginning, and I’m thinking about how to teach cultural history.  There are a lot of reasons to get “meta” right now, as a cultural historian. (Specifically, I’m a professor of Art History and Visual Studies.) First, there’s mode of delivery, and the cultural implications of that. If “the medium is the…
September 2, 2020
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Who Are You to Your Students? An Experiment

I am starting this year by asking students to change one of the most important liturgies of the classroom—what they call me.  As David Smith has taught us, if we want to engage in Christian teaching, we need to interrogate all of our classroom liturgies through a Christian perspective.  In this age of identity, the most important…
August 27, 2020
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The Ethnic Church Attendance Gap at Christian Colleges and Universities

Recently, while analyzing interviews from seniors at our university, we came across a curious and disturbing finding.  In three consecutive interviews, non-white students talked about how they had not attended church during their time at the university, and it showed in their own admitted lack of spiritual growth and sense of belonging at the institution.  Puzzled, we…
August 24, 2020
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Christ-Animating Learning: What Do We Mean?

For many years, Christian’s Scholar’s Review has proclaimed that “its primary objective is the publication of peer-reviewed scholarship and research, within and across the disciplines, that advances the integration of faith and learning…” Despite the historic use of “integration” language, we have decided to instead focus on “Christ-Animating learning.”  Why do we now propose a…
August 19, 2020
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How Did Christians Approach Pagan Learning?

When the early Church began building its own educational tradition, it faced the challenge of how developing this new Christian revelation should interact with Greek and Roman thinking. They had to ask, as the early Christian thinker Tertullian did, “What indeed does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?”Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics, 1:7. Various Church Fathers…
August 17, 2020