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I first heard a version of this paper delivered by President Ryken at the 2016 annual meeting of the Council for Christian College and University presidents. I must confess that my initial reaction was lukewarm at best. It seemed presumptuous and even self-serving that we would compare our roles as presidents to the sacred Biblical…

I often saw copies of Christian Scholar’s Review lying around the house when I was growing up as a faculty kid, so I feel a special sense of privilege in contributing to this issue of the journal. I also feel grateful to Gayle Beebe, Shirley Mullen, Roger Parrott, and Bill Robinson for their commendations and…

Once, while grabbing a quick lunch with faculty members in our dining commons, I had to leave the group abruptly to attend a meeting. “I need to run—to go do what I do,” I said. A long-term professor responded, “We’re not sure what it is you do, but we’re sure glad we don’t have to…

Most Protestant Christians do not give much attention to the theological and moral dimensions of contraception. In his essay, Branson Parler argues that Wendell Berry’s general critique of the modern mythos helps us to hear Roman Catholic teaching on contraception as resistance to one specific practice entailed by that mythos. Insofar as Protestants recognize that…

David A. Hoekema is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College. George Marsden was a professor of History at Calvin College (1965–1986), Duke Divinity School (1986–1992), and The University of Notre Dame (1992–2008). His publications include The Soul of the American University (1994) and Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003), winner of the Bancroft Prize. Richard Mouw…

William Shakespeare’s references to biblical material have been much written about, but little attention has been given to a connection between Macbeth and the New Testament Epistle of James. James addresses issues common to secular and sacred literature—issues such as the nature of wisdom, the conditions of unity, the difference between appearance and reality, a…

It is an understatement to say that confusion abounds over the words “evangelical” and “evangelicalism.”This is a shortened and revised version of a paper first given at the Henry Symposium on Religion and Politics, Calvin College, April, 2015. I would like to thank George Marsden and Corwin Smidt for reading an early draft of this…

A wide range of contemporary Christian scholarship claims that a history of Enlightenment ethical thought, social science and epistemology is the first step to exposing the inadequacies of modern accounts of the good life. Michael Kugler argues instead that their attempts at critical historical analysis and explanation are unconvincing. Their narrative arguments are built on…

E. Jerome Van Kuiken is an Associate Professor of Ministry and Christian Thought at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. Did God force pregnancy on Mary of Nazareth? The Winter 2012 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review presented Jack Mulder Jr.’s argument that non-Catholic Christians risk this startling implication by not accepting the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception,…

Secular norms of managerial rationality disregard God’s involvement in organizations. If we acknowledge that God is present and active in social organizing, how do our understandings and practices of entrepreneurship and management change? Such a perspective reconceives organizing as collaborating with the Spirit of God. This article describes the Spirit’s role in organizing social systems…

Advances in DNA sequencing technologies are revolutionizing our understanding of microbial populations on and within human beings. The goal of this article is to evaluate some of these discoveries in light of the story of scripture. The early chapters of Genesis make clear the relational nature of human being in regards to our connections to…

Contemporary attitudes toward student boredom have varied greatly. Whereas some have viewed it as a relatively trivial, even inevitable fact of classroom life, others have sought remediation through improved engagement techniques. Lost in many of these discussions, however, is a clear sense of the moral stakes associated with boredom. Drawing upon the work of Polish…

But we had reached a station. Those who were next to the windows told us its name: ‘Auschwitz.’No one had ever heard that name. So says the young narrator in Elie Wiesel’s Night, a hybrid novel-memoir (he calls it his “deposition”) about his Holocaust experience. That simple observation is laden with emotion—for the narrator (looking…

With the theme of hospitable readers and neighboring texts, the classical Greek virtue of hospitality meets the Christian virtue of loving one’s neighbor as one’s self. Either virtue involves looking out for the well-being of those whom we encounter, whether as guest or as neighbor, including those whose claim on us might not seem natural…

I. When Holden Caulfield decides to kill some time by going to see a war movie, he reflects that “It was probably the worst thing I could’ve done.”J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Little, Brown, 1951), 137. The movie is about an English soldier “that was in the war and loses…

When challenged in Luke 10 by a cheeky expert in Mosaic law who asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus turns the question back on his interlocutor and inquires what the Jewish scriptures say. The scholar can easily rehearse the formula found in the Torah: love God, and love your neighbor as…

Christ and the Neighbor In a well-known moment in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus responds with a logocentric-seeming question: “What is written in the law?”Biblical quotes here and throughout are from the NRSV. The lawyer appropriately answers with the…

Although Bret Easton Ellis has often been castigated by critics for his immoral characters, his novels not only have a moral framework, but arguably a Christian one. The confessional tone of his novels suggests that his characters are mere products of their surroundings, and that they are desperately seeking an escape from the excesses and…

Much of Christian scholarship has defended the Conception View of personhood, the idea that human beings have intrinsic value that begins at conception. However, modern reproductive technologies have led to new scientific insights into human embryology, without a matching increase in our metaphysical and moral understandings. A rigorous formulation of human nature and personhood is…

Physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) is considered by many to have been as important to physics as Newton and Einstein, especially for his work on electricity and magnetism and for being the first director of the Cavendish Laboratory. His technical achievements are significant, but he also offers us a model of the qualities of physics…