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An Extended Review of Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

Harold Laswell famously defined politics as “who gets what, when, and how.” These decisions are surely as fraught now as they were when Aristotle wrote about politics in ancient Athens. Politics has always been about power: who has the power to determine who gets what, when, and how? When it comes to power, Christians live…
April 25, 2025
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Love for Truth: Pondering Dennis Hiebert’s Love-First Epistemology.

In the fundamentalist churches of my childhood, propositional truths were weapons of spiritual warfare, wielded to help your friends and harm your enemies. Propositional truths held the community together, and they held the world at bay. Disagreements about propositional truths split all three of the churches my family attended before I went off to college.…
April 24, 2025
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“When in the Boat Together” ft. the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities’ David A. Hoag I Saturdays at Seven – Special Episode

In this special episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with David A. Hoag, President of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Hoag opens by discussing the investments Christian colleges and universities make in fostering relationship between faith and learning and how the CCCU is prepared to increase efforts…
April 23, 2025
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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life, Part III: Persons

The first post in this series pondered problematic modern Christian conceptions of truth, and the second pondered prescribed classic Christian practices of love, arguing for its priority. The focus in both was not on compelling truths about God, nor virtuous love of God or nature. Instead, the conundrum was what Christians believe to be true…
April 16, 2025
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Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life, Part II: Love

Yesterday’s post unpacked the problematic character of modern positivist Christian conceptualization and prioritization of truth. Though truth undoubtably matters enormously, it was proposed that absolute truth about metaphysical matters is not attainable, that assertions of propositional truth claims are prone to exercising power and producing interpersonal alienation, and that in profound experiential (not necessarily epistemological)…
April 15, 2025

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Shocking Our Socks off the Mantle

Annoyed by plump plastic Santas perched on suburban lawns, I was suddenly struck by the relevance of my scholarship to cultural conceptions of Christmas. In my November CSR blog, I discussed the need for Christians to avoid an “economy of exchange” in their vocabularies about salvation, and this time of year we can’t help but…
December 14, 2020
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Government for the Time Being: An Advent Reflection

Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth!  So begins the most acclaimed moment in the most acclaimed Christmas oratorio ever written.This post is adapted from William S. Brewbaker III, “Government For the Time Being,” in Austin Sarat, ed., Legal Responses to Religious Practices in the United States: Accommodation and Its Limits (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012),…
December 11, 2020
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Polarization and the Academy

One of the clearest conclusions we can take away from the 2020 election season is that political and ideological polarization has continued to be one of the most powerful forces in our social life. In recent days, I have seen a variety of calls for us to come together as a people, or as a…
Steven McMullen Headshot
December 9, 2020
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More Than (Art and Orthodoxy)

In the early centuries after Christ, myriad heresies peeled free of the doctrinal core, curling attractively, then blanching and withering. They were like eddies swirling off a current, spiraling prettily and then dissipating. Or like whorls of smoke from a pipe. Such things were attractive precisely in their divergence from the core. They were Life…
December 7, 2020
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Does God Pick the Winner of the Super Bowl?

The work of a Christian scholar is bound to the questions of the Christian community, those questions that rise up from the “fear and trembling” by which all Christians work out their salvation and whose answers, however incomplete, form the basis of the account of the hope that is in us all. This means that…
December 4, 2020
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Reflections on How to End a Semester

This semester seems to be ending in stages. We planned to send students home at Thanksgiving and teach the remainder of the semester online. Then a spike in COVID infections in the wider population and a state shutdown of schools and universities in response pulled us out of the classroom a week early. Some semesters…
December 2, 2020
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How Can a Christian be a Scientist?

I used to ask this question as a student. It took me a while to get to know the University staff who were Christians. I was aware of pressing ethical issues and controversial questions about science and the Bible; I knew science was a demanding career that might compete with church commitments; I knew some…
November 30, 2020
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Gratitude Needs Direction

For Christians, most virtue words do not actually describe virtues unless they are directed properly. To put one’s faith, hope, or love in the wrong being or thing is actually a vice and not a virtue. That’s why when attempting to measure Christian virtue, it is always hard to find appropriate psychological scales. Hope in…
November 26, 2020
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Jesus the Great Philosopher

Jesus the Great Philosopher: Recovering the Wisdom for the Good Life by Jonathan T. Pennington, Associate Professor of New Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was released last month by Brazos Press. It’s a book that will appeal to a variety of readers, from students to professors, from theologians to philosophers, from Christians…
November 25, 2020