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Going to School with Marilynne Robinson: Sacramental Education as Alternative Paradigm for Faith

Utilizing the essays of Marilynne Robinson, this paper provides an alternative model to faith integration. Rather than a worldview approach, I argue for a sacramental imagination that helps re-enchant and reinvigorates the educational task. As opposed to two separate spheres of knowledge—human knowing and divine knowledge—a sacramental imagination via Robinson sees the divine reality in…
November 8, 2022
ArticleIntroduction

Introduction to the Theme Issue: Conviction, Civility, and Christian Witness

Rick Langer is the Director of the Office of Faith and Learning at Biola University where he is also Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology and the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project. His publications have focused on applying theology to a wide variety of disciplines including business leadership, disability, suffering, bioethics, and most recently,…
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Speaking the Truth in Love: The Challenge of Public Engagement

The love command is meant to encompass all areas of life for Christians, including Christian public engagement. Given cultural understandings of love, defining love carefully becomes a pressing task. Gorman’s cruciform definition of love helps by defining love negatively, as not seeking our own advantage or edification, and positively, as seeking the good, the advantage,…
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Log in Your Own Eye

Wayne Forte was born in Manila, Philippines in 1950, and studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Irvine. Wayne has been a member of CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts) for twenty-five years and participated in the Florence Portfolio Project in 1993. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. © 2010,…
July 15, 2022
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Interview: The Church, the Christian Academy, and the Public Square

Russell Moore is one of the leading Christian voices in the public square today. At the time of this interview, Moore was serving as the President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the moral and public policy agency of the Southern Baptist Convention. Shortly after this interview, he resigned his position and…
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Interview: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion

In July 2021, Tim Muehlhoff and Rick Langer had a lengthy conversation with Theon Hill, a communications scholar whose research delves into the interface between the Black community and white evangelicalism, writing on the relationship between rhetoric and social change—particularly as related to race, culture, and American politics. He has written on the topic of…
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How Intellectual Virtues Can Help Us Build Better Discourse

American civil discourse is in decay. It is commonplace that many citizens not only disagree but do so disagreeably. However, disagreeableness need not be a feature of our discourse. After diagnosing several instances of decayed discourse as failures of intellectual virtue, the article offers suggestions for fostering virtues—such as humility, open-mindedness, and fair-mindedness—that can help…
July 15, 2022
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Troubled Waters

© 2017, Used by permission of the artist. “Water is a human right!” read signs held by angry residents in Flint MichiganJake May, “More Than Fifty People Protest Flint’s Water Quality in Downtown March,” MLive, February 14, 2015, https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2015/02/flint_residents_protest_citys.html. —a majority-Black city where 40 percent of people live in poverty—complaining of unsafe drinking water. In…
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Navigating the Double-Edged Sword of Moral Conviction in Politics

Studies in moral and political psychology increasingly shed light on both the positive and negative political consequences of moral conviction. While people’s convictions engender courage to stand up for their beliefs despite the cost, they also trigger more negative emotions, polarized attitudes, and hostile responses. At a time when our political climate appears increasingly divided…
July 15, 2022
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Possible Answers to Prayer

Your petitions—though they continue to bear just the one signature—have been duly recorded. Your anxieties—despite their constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value—nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind. Your repentance—all but obscured beneath a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more conspicuous resentment—is sufficient. Your intermittent concern for the sick, the suffering,…
July 15, 2022
ArticleReview Essays

Winsome Conviction

Let’s start with the proposition that conversation about civility among evan-gelical Christians today has too much of the book of Proverbs and not enough of the book of Job. In contrast with the complex emotional world of Job (more on that later), the proverbists have a settled, centered comfortability with the world—so long as one…
July 15, 2022
ArticleReview Essays

How (Not) to Lose Your Soul While Saving the World: World Vision, Tearfund, and the Precarious Rise of Evangelical Humanitarianism

In the late 1940s, budding American evangelist Bob Pierce visited Amoy, China, to preach the gospel at a girl’s school run by Dutch Reformed missionary Tena Hoelkeboer. Not knowing much about Chinese culture, Pierce told students to go home and tell their parents that they were going to become Christians. One of them actually did…
July 15, 2022
ArticleReview and Response

Art + Faith: A Theology of Making

It may be hard to imagine, but before around 1800, almost every human product in the world was handmade. Every object was unique and wrought with time, sweat, and effort by artisans who had trained decades to master their craft. Most people, therefore, owned very few “artful” objects—maybe a few clothes and a few pictures—many…
July 15, 2022
ArticleReviews

Refuge Reimagined: Biblical Kinship in Global Politics

Policymakers (and therefore, citizens) in modern democracies confront a knot of intertwining problems, from climate change to nuclear proliferation to terrorism. Many of the threads have formed a rope called human migration, as drought, political instability or corruption, and neocolonial economic policies by the major powers interlace to drive seventy million (and counting) refugees from…
July 15, 2022