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Starting around the year 1400, a new kind of Nativity Scene began to grace European art – and Italian Renaissance art, particularly. Before, Nativity scenes often featured Mary holding a swaddled baby Jesus and surrounded by animals and worshippers in a stable. The new formula, however, showed the baby Jesus lying naked on the ground,…

Imagine a single snowflake—albeit a giant one that encompasses 196,880+ dimensions. That’s the word-picture used by Mark Ronan to describe “the monster,” an extraordinarily large, complex numerical entity discovered by mathematicians in their hunt for mathematical symmetries, and one that may shed light on the deep structure of the cosmos itself.Mark Ronan, Symmetry and the…

Contra to Spencer’s demand for orthodoxy, Creation Care Discipleship commits a chapter to “Ecumenical Insights,” drawing on wisdom from representative socially conscious Christian lineages. Providing a brief overview of denominational contributions, Chapter 4 leads with the visions of Pope Francis, Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I, and Lutheran ethicist Paul Santmire. Bouma-­Prediger carefully selects generally applicable…

In the past year or so, six graduates of Baylor University’s English graduate program have published books about the arts of reading well and the value of forming Christian imaginations. Jessica Hooten Wilson (grad of 2009) published Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Jessica has also published several…

Recently I re-watched The Truman Show, the 1998 film about a man, played by Jim Carey, who discovers that his life has been broadcast to the world as a reality TV show. Though produced a quarter of a century ago, the movie’s critique of an “always-on,” surveillant media culture felt timely and spoke to my…

A friend asked me not so long ago, “Where can we find hope in such uncertain times?” Many of us have been asking this reasonable and pressing question for much of the past five years. As Christians, we can easily recite a couple of the 140 Bible verses that, in various different stories and admonitions,…

Every once in a while, I come across an article or book that exemplifies the best of what Christ-animated scholarship can and should be. I recently came across one such article in the field of psychology that addressed the topic of human worth. The concepts of self-worth and self-esteem have a long history in the…

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Col. 3:17 This past year a group of us published an empirical finding that will not be surprising to Christians. We found that students who indicated higher levels of certain virtues…

I appreciate Father Halík’s response to my review of his book. Let me reiterate that it’s an impressive work replete with valuable insights and many nuggets of wisdom and sanity. Despite the criticisms that I offered, his and my analysis of contemporary Christianity/Catholicism overlap considerably. In wondering whether forces extrinsic to the church have caused…

I thank Professor Howard for his attention to my book. I am seriously considering his objections. My book was written during a time of a COVID-­19 pandemic and other global threats and a great division in the world, and the Catholic Church. Many of those threats seem even more serious now, three years later. I…

This fall I am teaching an Honors Seminar designed for students in my home university’s College of Health Sciences. The students are all eager to pursue their professional careers as medical doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. Sadly, only 10% of them have expressed any interest in practicing in those parts of the world where they…

Last month, I attended a conference at Calvin University focused on how to counter reductionism in teaching and education. Certainly, our culture has been in thrall to reductionist tendencies for some time, as the angry, dismissive tone of internet culture and political discourse shows us. Sadly, this tone often makes its way into the classroom,…

Many faculty professional development days, hallway dialogues between colleagues, and programs for the integration of faith and learning exist because of the common question: how can we motivate our students to desire learning? Although scaffolded course objectives and early alert systems for struggling students are designed with the ostensible end of effective teaching in mind,…

The words of Calvinists like Kuyper on the one hand, and secular “formalists” like Greenberg on the other, can sometimes seem interchangeable. However, Kuyper and Greenberg would certainly have disagreed concerning the “area of competence” contained in the “Artistic Sphere.” For Kuyper (and for Rookmaaker, who worked out Kuyper’s ideas through art criticism) the artist…

I was a senior in college when I first encountered Modern Art and the Death of a Culture by the Calvinist scholar Hans Rookmaaker.Hans Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (Crossway, 1994). I was studying art history at the Courtauld Institute in London; the book was lent to me by a local…

Since Charles Taylor published his monumental work A Secular Age (seriously, try picking up a copy, it’s huge) in 2007, Christian thinkers of a certain cast have been talking about “disenchantment.” This discourse persists through the present day, when, just as one example, O. Alan Noble has engaged with books on the subject of enchantment…

Derek Schuurman rightly warns against the use of chatbot “personas,” which are created by configuring a program like ChatGPT to respond in the style of a particular person. For Schuurman, the problem is that using these services encourages “ontological confusion” – by interacting with a computer as if it is a human being, “we run…