Skip to main content
Blog

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: Then and Now

Editor's Note: The following is a book excerpt from the new edited volume: From the Outrageous to the Scandalous: Re-imagining Christian Thinking and Scholarship in an Age of Tribalism and Ideological Resentment, eds. Robert H. Woods Jr. and Mark Allan Steiner. The assignment that I’ve been given is to attempt an assessment, now more than a…
June 9, 2026
Blog

An Alien, an Octopus, and the Inescapable Grace of God

In watching two recent movies—Project Hail Mary and Remarkably Bright Creatures—I’ve noticed something that might help us understand the much-talked-about “vibe shift” that’s happening in America. If you’re unfamiliar with this trend, it refers to an emerging sense that our long cultural season of irony, nihilism, and performative cynicism may be giving way to something…
June 8, 2026
Blog

A Protestant Response to the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas on AI

Pope Leo XIV released his first papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on May 25, a roughly 42,000-word document outlining a Catholic response to recent developments in AI. I had been eagerly anticipating this encyclical and spent much of the release day poring over the text. While there have been other Christian efforts to release statements about…
June 5, 2026
Blog

How to Train a Trillionaire

Elon Musk recently made the headlines for his proposed Tesla pay package that could exceed one trillion dollars,1 setting a new high watermark in CEO compensation. It is unlikely that Musk will actually receive that amount for multiple reasons. The proposed pay scheme includes a series of financial targets, including dramatically increasing the firm’s market…
June 4, 2026
Blog

AI, Translation, and Telling the Truth

I am working on a large translation project this year. I have been surprised to find several conversation partners voicing the assumption that I am getting AI to do the translating for me. I’ve been wondering how to respond. A short, but in the end inadequate answer is that, impressive as the current variations on…
June 3, 2026
Blog

Navigating Murky Pathways through Christian Higher Education: A New Resource

How do faculty at Christian higher education institutions navigate their careers with purpose and with joy? That is the driving question behind our new edited collection, Purpose and Joy: Pursuing a Meaningful Career in Christian Higher Education, available this month from Abilene Christian University Press and Leafwood Publishers. When we first posted the call for…
June 2, 2026

Subscribe

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

Blog

Golden Age

In 1863, five years before his death at age 86, the French painter J-A-D Ingres completed a small, jewel-like canvas he titled The Golden Age. It is a gentle, luxuriant fantasy, this little picture. Blue mountains rise in the distance, and the air seems hung with gilded mist. The afternoon light burnishes green trees to…
October 11, 2021
Blog

The Meaning of Technology

The book of Genesis opens with the creation account describing a beautiful world of sea, earth, sky, plants, fish, birds and other animals. And then God places a human in the garden. Immediately following this part of the story is a curious verse, which at first seems out of place. The verse is Genesis 2:12,…
October 8, 2021
Blog

Responding to Student Excuses with the Wisdom of Solomon

These years are rough, no doubt, with both students and faculty altering daily life in order to survive the pandemic—and grieving those who didn’t. While many challenges are novel, and hopefully temporary, one is perennial: the student excuse. Faculty may see student excuses as annoying time-drains that divert from the real work of education and…
October 7, 2021
Blog

Shouting at Your Neighbor: Why We Bother with Other People’s Languages

This essay was published in 2012 in the book Practically Human: College Professors Speak from the Heart of Humanities Education edited by Gary Schmidt & Matthew Walhout (Grand Rapids: Calvin College Press, 2012, 133-145). It asks why we invest time and resources in learning other languages and seeks to look further than pragmatic motivations based…
October 6, 2021
BlogReviews

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Joseph Henrich’s big, impressive, and fun book should appeal to scholars across a broad spectrum. Historians, sociologists, economists, church historians, psychologists, cultural historians, and educators will find much to ponder and process in The WEIRDest People in the World. Henrich tells the story not of how the West was won, but how it was born.…
October 5, 2021
Blog

How Professional Ethics Secularizes Moral Thinking

Any professor using a popular professional ethics textbook in their class is likely secularizing the moral thinking of their students. To help you understand why that is the case, I want to outline briefly the history and reemergence of professional ethics and then sketch the nature of most common professional ethics texts. A Brief History…
October 1, 2021
Blog

Science as a Discipline of Contemplation?

Editor’s Note: The following blog post is provided by Professor Tom McLeish from his 2021 Boyle Lectures.  The full version of his lecture was recently published in Zygon together with a response by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, an article by Fraser Watts summarizing the panel discussion, and a second article by Professor McLeish…
September 29, 2021
Blog

Reconsidering Power

It’s almost three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. I’m trying to finish up a bit of writing while constantly keeping an eye on the top right-hand corner of my computer screen. Three o’clock is right when my daughter’s school day ends. Readers of Power Women might very well recognize these words. They are taken almost…
September 28, 2021
Blog

“Power Women” and the Professoriate

Growing up in a small New England town, I had a friend whose mother, a professor who taught at a private, religious college in the Berkshires, abruptly began dying her hair ash-brown when she was applying for tenure. I was bewildered and asked my friend, why? I thought gray hair was a sign of wisdom—a…
September 27, 2021