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I once heard a sarcastic remark after attending a poetry reading. Perhaps I made the remark. At any rate, the reading featured a past-middle-aged poet reading newish poems from the latest book—the tenth or so—this poet had written. The sarcastic comment: “I sip my coffee as I gaze on the birdfeeder out my window. I…

Over the past 52 years, Christian Scholar’s Review has published over 1,000 articles and is well on its way to reviewing 4,000 books. Published quarterly, each issue usually showcases 4–5 articles and 8–10 book reviews from the full range of academic fields. In our continual mission to further Christ-animated scholarship, we invite you to add…

Picture Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_The_Risen_Christ_Appearing_to_Mary_Magdalen_-_WGA19094.jpg We were flying east across the Atlantic Ocean, anticipating our overnight stop in Amsterdam, and were soon attracted by an interesting message on the headrest in front of us. It announced a celebration of the 400th anniversary year of Rembrandt van Rijn’s birth! Might it be possible for us to join the…

I recently learned about the term, “goblin mode.”I would like to thank Professor David Tizzard for introducing the terms goblin mode and godsaeng to me. If you are also hearing this phrase for the first time, it refers to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way…

Let’s start with my least favorite part of this book: its title. To be fair, it is my least favorite part because this book serves as an excellent example of robust Christian reflection on technology and the specific challenges of particular professional fields. While people in those professional fields will find the book most immediately…

Last fall semester, Beth Madison posted on the CSR blog about vulnerability in the classroom—a vulnerability on the part of professors that could lead to openness from students, and ultimately growth toward wholeness. I’d like to look at the issue of vulnerability from a different angle—that of students’ vulnerability in the classroom—and consider some of…

Baylor University recently published a land acknowledgment (LA). A few other Christian institutions and conferences have also created them (see for example here, here, and here). According to the Baylor University link, “A Land Acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many Native Nations and communities. Today, land acknowledgments are used by Native…

I had my first MRI ever just a few months after my 24th birthday. Two days later, I’d undergo an emergency craniotomy to remove as much as possible of a baseball-sized tumor that had, unbeknownst to me, been slowly invading my otherwise healthy brain. I soon received my diagnosis: brain cancer, the slow growing sort…at…

One of the first things I did as editor of this journal (CSR) was commission a review of church historian Mark Noll’s excellent and challenging book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind which was first published in 1994 by Eerdmans and now, again, with new material in 2022. That review was by Gordon College professor…

Sometime in the next few weeks, it will be the third anniversary of the moment when each of us realized that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 would not remain isolated to Asia and a couple of cruise ships but was bearing down across the globe. On March 10th, 2020, I shrugged off The Atlantic article titled…

John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Huguenot,_on_St._Bartholomew%27s_Day In 1852, the pious British artist John Everett Millais (who has been featured elsewhere in this blog), painted a heart-rending image called A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day. Here, beside an ivied wall, two young lovers furtively embrace. The air is thick and the…

During focus group research for the book Digital Life Together, two secondary school students offered the following reflections about what happens when their teachers assign reading tasks: we'll ask , "can we skim it and just look for the answers?" And they're, like, "No, I actually want you to read it".  … One of my…

“It is a triumph of science to have, in some degree, described the electron, and preposterous to suggest is has been explained.” —Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things Faith integration is a task integral to the vocation of Christian education. It’s become a buzzword and identity marker: good Christian education means robust faith integration. Faith…

People today are ambivalent toward history. We can’t deny it; but we’re not quite sure how to approach it or what to do with it. Those in the “don’t know much about history” camp are both correct and generally content in making such a claim. Others regard history as little more than an academic subject—necessary,…

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, I belong to a Roman Catholic family that went to Mass every Sunday, prayed the rosary every day during the month of October to honor Mary, the mother of Jesus, and went to pre-dawn Mass during the Advent season before Christmas. My brothers were altar servers and my parents…

For the past few years, my family has implemented the practice of selecting a Biblical passage to be the “family verse/passage” for the calendar year. For 2023, we have chosen a well-known verse in Psalm 19:14 (ESV): “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O…

For Christmas 2021, my wife got me the gift of improv comedy classes. We happen to have an improv comedy theater right here in our little Chicago suburb, and she signed me up for a Level 1 class. She says I brought up the idea at some point—I certainly don’t remember doing that—but I was…

My inventive colleague, Dr. Isaac Soon, recently offered a constructive counterpart to all the handwringing in academia about ChatGPT. Instead of bemoaning ChatGPT’s potential to mimic student papers for fear of widespread cheating, why not use ChatGPT as a teaching and research tool? Isaac put up on his weblog a process he could supervise, as…

There are, I believe, two major reasons—one external and one internal—why the number of humanities majors is sinking in colleges and universities across the country. The former has to do with economic forces outside the control of the departments of English, history, and philosophy, and even of academia itself. Job anxiety and rising costs have…

When I began reading Servant Teaching—Practices for Renewing Christian Higher Education, by Quintin Schultze, I felt like I had discovered a priceless jewel for which countless educators had searched for decades. Schultze addresses, with grace and humility, the theme of teacher dispositions. And, he does not just dance around the topic of character-based leadership, as…