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Four Necessary Skills for Christ-Animated Learning (Part IV): Developing Christian Critical Thinking about Academic Sub-Cultures

Culture is one of those overused words that requires a clear definition to be helpful. Personally, I find one of the most useful definitions comes from H. Richard Niebuhr’s book, Christ and Culture. Every Christian should read Niebuhr’s famous work to help them develop Christian critical thinking about how Christ can and should animate one’s…
January 16, 2026
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At Christmastime: Faith and Memory

The Christmas tree is tall and wide, and its sharp smell fills the room. It seems to own the space around it, and the rest of us hover in its shadow, coming and going like ghosts or puffs of wind. Somehow, the tree feels more real than the thing we call “reality.” My child self…
December 19, 2025
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A Review of Word Made Fresh

If poetry is ever going to matter again to Christians, we’ll need interesting, winsome, accessible teachers and books to explain the value of verse and show us how it works. One doesn’t naturally “develop a taste” for poetry. We must be taught. Abram Van Engen’s Word Made Fresh can refresh our palate and nourish our…
December 18, 2025

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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
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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
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“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
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Guest Post: Jacob’s Well: Pride and Grace in Eden, Arkansas

The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps. -Proverbs 16:9 In my first CSR post, I wrote about Nomadland’s cardiac geography: protagonist Fern’s wistful spirit and her fellow van-dwellers’ radical sense of independence. Their pride manifests as constant movement—perpetual flight—which suggests that spiritual restlessness results in physical waywardness. A similar…
June 24, 2021
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Guest Post: Lived Religion and Sports

Lived religion Today’s elite athletes have much at stake in sports.  Climbing up the rankings within youth, collegiate and professional sports is no doubt daunting, where the victor has the best chance of advancing and everybody will seemingly do whatever it takes to win.  Competition can produce uncertainty and anxiety in the lives of athletes,…
June 21, 2021
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A National Experiment in Ignoring Fathers

Betrayed. That’s how Olga, an education official responsible for moral upbringing in the Soviet Ministry of Education, felt after the downfall of communism. In an interview five years later, she shared with me her devastation: For many years, I had been sure that I was doing exactly what is needed. I was horrified when I…
June 18, 2021
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If a Tree Falls on a Campus, Does It Make Any Sense?

In the space of about a year, three big trees fell in middle of the Seattle Pacific University campus. All of these were close to the Tiffany Loop, where we hold an “Ivy Cutting” graduation ceremony under the canopy of branches every June (when weather and pandemics permit). Each time a tree fell, I’d remember…