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(The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, Church Beautiful: Sacred Art and Spiritual Healing, available now from Cascade.) Finding What’s Missing We live in a broken culture. Levels of distrust and anger are high. Among young people, especially, clinical depression and anxiety are woefully common. Patterns of self-isolation – the deliberate “checking…

I’ll begin with a concession: by the standards that tend to govern education today, widespread employment of generative AI tools seems a marvelous idea. As colleges respond to the “enrollment cliff” by embracing market values and selling commodified diplomas to prospective student-consumers, a promise of the ability to leverage generative AI tools to synergize human-bot…

The word “deconstruction” usually carries a negative connotation for many Christians. Yet, we still need to keep and employ both the term and the activity it signifies. After all, when scholars talk about deconstructing, they refer to dismantling assumed ways of thinking that are false, unjust, based primarily upon power acquisition, or, to use a Christian…

I was blessed to earn my doctorate at a Christian university, and have served for almost two decades in higher education--and most of that journey has been with Christian schools. I must add that my initial work in HEd was with the state school near my home community, and I still have fond memories of…

The end of April marks the close of the 2025-2026 academic year and CSR’s first “Month of Giving” campaign. As the publisher, I am grateful for the generosity of an anonymous party who provided CSR with a $10,000 matching donation. I am also grateful to all individuals who responded with gifts toward helping us meet…

"Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ." Galatians 6:2-3 is the foundation I use to introduce my research to students related to empathy. To me, the verse exemplifies empathy. Empathy is often defined as the ability to understand another’s emotions and experiences. What is often missing from this affective…

Three recent events at three Christian colleges within 200 miles of one another offer a glimpse into the muddled reality of higher education. A midwestern Christian college announced it was closing at the end of the current school year. A neighboring school announced the completion of a quarter-billion-dollar campaign only two years after making significant…

Once upon a time there was a Christian University (CU) with a wonderful mission to educate men and women for leadership and service by integrating excellence in academics and living out Christian commitment within a caring community. It was a beautiful vision and one that this university faithfully sought to exhibit to the world for…

Jessica Martin, known to everyone as Jess, was a graduate student at Baylor and our student worker for the Christian Scholar’s Review website. Over the past several years, Jess and I exchanged hundreds of emails as she transferred the articles from the print issue onto the site. She was also often the final editor of…

Scrolling Ourselves to Death is a project of the Gospel Coalition, harnessing the arguments of Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, to take on post-millennial media. This compilation of essays applies Postman’s logic and insights about the social and spiritual impact of television to the 2025 world of social media and other digital…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into nearly every sphere of human life. This is certainly true of higher education, for good and ill, and Christian colleges and universities are no exception. My own alma mater, Olivet Nazarene University, in addition to grappling with some of the most pressing AI-related ethical considerations around student…

Over the past two weeks, my colleagues Margaret Diddams and Perry Glanzer have articulated the mission of Christian Scholar’s Review by considering the “why” and “what” of the journal. In this blog post, I will explore the “how” question—how CSR approaches its mission. (As you might expect, the “how” overlaps considerably with the “what” and…

I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God's thoughts, the rest are details. –Albert Einstein1 The turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century was a heady time for advances in atomic…

The conversation began, as it often does, with conviction. In my undergraduate criminal justice classroom, we were discussing the death penalty. One student spoke with certainty about justice as retribution—grounded, she explained, in her understanding of Scripture. Across the room, another student responded just as firmly, articulating a vision of justice rooted in restoration, also…

Finding one’s calling is a rich, complex journey. Honesty “about the ups and downs of calling will open up conversation” that fosters contemplating more meaningful and purposeful lives (16). That is one of the primary aims of Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore’s recent book. Utilizing faith, philosophy, and pragmatism, she pushes back on the pop culture notion of…

As an educational psychologist, I study teachers and students, both of whom are learners in their own ways. As artificial intelligence (AI) burgeons in classrooms, I cannot help but think of Romans as a possible answer to the question Benjamin Bloom posed more than four decades ago. Roughly, Bloom’s question was: “How can we deliver…

Last week, Margaret Diddams discussed the important mission that guides Christian Scholar’s Review (CSR)—the “why.” As someone who studies Christian higher education, I also find that faithful institutions have theologically rich and informed mission statements. Unfortunately, many Christian institutions with great mission statements do not consistently demonstrate the operationalization of that mission in all they…