Blog

One of the first things I learned when I started graduate school was how to be a hockey coach. Actually, this happened several weeks before I registered for any courses at the University of Alberta. We arrived in Edmonton—four hundred miles north of the Montana border—well before the first academic term began. We had no…

From our nation’s beginnings, Americans have feared the death of religion. The Puritans had not even arrived in the New World before they started predicting what would happen should they prove faithless to the Lord. In his “Model of Christian Charity” address, given to English Puritans departing for New England in 1630, Massachusetts Bay Company…

I imagine many readers of Christian Scholars Review are aware of Tyler Austin Harper's Atlantic essay, "Confessions of a Token Black Professor." Harper writes about the five years he spent as a tenure-track professor of environmental studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. During his years at Bates, he says he was treated more as…

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful; I know that full well. – Psalm 139:14 Protein biogenesis in eukaryotic cells proceeds through a highly coordinated series of molecular events that begin in the nucleus. Gene expression initiates with transcription by complex molecular machines mostly composed of proteins, during which…

Most students come to college with plans for a job but seldom consider their need for a theology of work. Their parents have told them they will one day require money, and they almost all want to pursue lives filled with meaning, but they are often held hostage to economics in understanding precisely what it…

Mathematics and logic are probably the two fields deemed least susceptible to religious influence. Doesn’t 2 + 2 = 4 and a2 + b2 = c2 (the Pythagorean Theorem) hold whether you’re a Christian, a Muslim, or an atheist? How can religious faith affect the truths of arithmetic or geometry? As a baby boomer growing…

As I head back into the regular rhythm of the school year and reflect on my summer, I find myself thinking about how much of it was spent writing and thinking alongside other people. Some of that work has been on two edited volumes: reading and responding to colleagues' chapters, debating introductions, moving texts around,…

Editor's Note: The following is the final part of Amy Davis Abdallah's review essay of G. P. Wagenfuhr and Amy Erickson’s Sabbath Gospel: A New Narrative of Time, Rest, and the Work of the Church; Euntaek David Shin’s Rest: A Theological Account; and Travis West’s The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection,…

Editor's Note: The following is the second part of Amy Davis Abdallah's review essay of G. P. Wagenfuhr and Amy Erickson’s Sabbath Gospel: A New Narrative of Time, Rest, and the Work of the Church; Euntaek David Shin’s Rest: A Theological Account; and Travis West’s The Sabbath Way: Making Room in Your Life for Rest, Connection,…

It is no secret that the western world’s relationship with time, work, and community is complicated, generally unhealthy, and does not lead to restful, delighted lives. We tend to continually desire more and perfection, and so tend not to stop, cease, rest, or enjoy community. Three recent books seek to reconstruct our theology and habits…

On July 4, 2026, Dr. Robert B. Sloan, Jr., President of Houston Christian University, was called home to be with the Lord Christ after nearly two decades leading HCU. His leadership was marked by faithfulness to Christian higher education and a vision for a university rigorous in pursuit yet no less faithful in commitment. My…

“Elite culture” is a dubious thing. It can often feel like a harmful construct designed to keep control of those who already have it. If this view is correct, then there’s nothing excellent, or even especially better, about elite culture - it’s only a code deployed by those “in the know” to exclude others. Not…

Recently, especially after Elon Musk passed the trillionaire mark, many people posted online about the ways Musk’s money could help the poor. Others, including famous politicians, then chimed in about what could be done with lots of billionaires' money. Unsurprisingly, no one posted about what they were currently doing with their money or other possessions…

A rabbi friend was leading a series of evening discussions about the Sinai commandments for folks in his synagogue, and he invited me to join him in the session dealing with coveting. Some business scandals were much in the news at the time, so we did give some attention to the topic of greed in…

For many Christian scholars, disability studies rarely come to mind when they think about the future of theological and missiological discourse. Yet it should. Globally, individuals with disabilities are among the largest unreached groups, with an estimated 90–95% never having encountered the gospel. In the United States, almost 59% do attend a religious service (2).…

A student I knew well confided in me last year, reporting that she was experiencing emotional distress related to trauma from her early childhood and needed an extension on an assignment. I did not doubt the veracity of the student’s report, nor did I feel it was my role to probe further into her struggles.…

As mentioned in a post last month, one thing I have noticed over my twenty-four years of graduate teaching at a Christian university is this: Undergraduates from secular universities come into our programs focused on figuring out how to be a Christian in the world, since that has been their experience and pressing need. Indeed,…

Jonathan Haidt has called this generation of students “The Anxious Generation.” That’s an interesting choice of words. Kierkegaard thought that anxiety is what we feel when we become aware that we are, despite everything we can point to as an excuse, fundamentally free, and therefore fundamentally responsible. We feel anxiety because we know we’re free;…

What will our resurrected bodies look like? Ample ink has been spilled upon such a question. Augustine, for example, believed our bodies would be redeemed as if they were in the prime of life. He further mused upon the gender, height, weight, and even the length of hair and nails of our resurrected forms. So,…

One Sunday in the 1950s, when I was in my teens, my uncle and aunt had joined my parents for refreshments after our Sunday evening church service. Before the delicacies were ready, my dad guided my uncle downstairs to my basement aviary and aquarium room to see my nesting parakeets and tropical fish. As they…