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Christian universities and colleges that accept non-Christian students, which is the majority of Christian universities, always face the challenge of loving our non-Christian neighbors sacrificially while remaining faithful to our love for God (and by extension the institution’s Christian mission). The reason why doing both is so difficult stems from a common human reality: We…

Recently, a colleague shared a question with me that he often discusses with his students during the first days of the semester. "Do you think Adam knew how to make a guitar?" It is a fun question to ponder, and to listen to students ponder. But, beyond the novelty of the pondering, I think this…

On June 1, 2025, 45-year-old Mohammed Sabry Soliman yelled "Free Palestine!" and tossed Molotov cocktails at Jewish participants at an event meant to draw attention to the plight of Israeli hostages. The cocktails burned eight of the participants, with one 82-year-old victim eventually dying. Two months later, on August 27th, a 70-year-old Jewish woman shopping…

Moral Cosmology: On Being in the World Fully and Well is philosopher Albert Borgmann’s final work, having been published posthumously following his death in May 2023 at the age of eighty-five. Borgmann served as professor of philosophy for five decades at the University of Montana until his retirement in 2020 and is best known for…

Evangelicals and Abortion Debates in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s: Back to the Bible Why were evangelicals slower than Catholics to join the pro-life cause? Historians have sometimes argued that it was because evangelicals were unconcerned about abortion in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But…

In my last contribution to CSR, I tried to articulate, as briefly as possible, the “phenomenology of grace.”Mitchell, A. C. (2025, July 22). Revelation and Remembrance: Prayer and the Phenomenology of Grace. Christian Scholar’s Review, Christ Animated Learning Blog. How do persons sense, discern, and abide the world as it’s presented to them? How do…

In his 1939 sermon Learning in Wartime, CS Lewis considered whether education should continue amid high-stakes global conflict. Is learning something that should be suspended during a war, saved only for times of peace and predictability? Or does the acquisition of knowledge, learning, thinking, and prudential judgment become more important during moments of upheaval? Predictably…

For two thousand years Christians have wrestled with what it means to follow Jesus’s command to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God. In Romans 13 Paul tells us we should obey and honor the authorities, and his Roman citizenship twice plays a pivotal role in the drama…

It was a quiet morning in my basement carrel in the Calvin College library. I was reading the Gospel of John— the only book of the Bible past Genesis that begins with the words, “In the beginning...”. My family had recently left our beloved Town of Dunn in Wisconsin for my childhood home of Grand…

One of the primary things we learn about God in the Bible is that he is holy (Lev. 11:44-45; 19:2; any reference to the Holy Spirit). Moreover, we learn that as image bearers of God, we are to exhibit God’s character by being holy as well (Lev. 11:45; I Peter 1:15-16). Yet, holiness is a…

We typically relegate the imagination to the realm of make believe. By creating fantastical worlds and playing pretend, the imagination in this view seems like an escape from reality. But as Judith Wolfe’s The Theological Imagination explains, the imagination is not an escape from reality, but what shapes our reality. Following in the philosophical tradition…

Darren Dyck, in Will & Love: Shakespeare and the Motion of the Soul, takes the turn to religion in a different direction by demonstrating how the medieval mode of theological romance in Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer provides the interpretive key to Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the volitional motion of love. By “theological romance,” Dyck means the…

David Anonby also begins Shakespeare on Salvation: Crossing the Reformation Divide with a reasoned defense for his engagement with religion in Shakespeare, invoking some of the same scholars that Oser does in his introduction. Anonby describes those in the turn to religion who have challenged the “secularizing narrative of the theater” (4), before turning to…

Editor's Note: Due to an earlier failure of the e-mail distribution of this three-part post, we are reposting it over the next three days.   It has been approximately twenty-five years since the “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies. When I informally polled a few colleagues in history, psychology, and social work about a turn to…

Hunter’s overall point is well taken, though: new efforts at undergirding democracy became more focused on reason (internally derived ideas) or on natural law (externally derived absolutes), and less so an amalgamation of the two, feeding eventually into a culture war. For instance, John Dewey had great faith in our capacity to reason our way…

James Davison Hunter wants us to know things look bad because they are bad and have been so for quite some time: the United States is not only facing stark polarizations in our time, but, he argues, these polarizations are a result of the longstanding fault lines within our foundations for democracy. In this long-awaited…

“…but test everything; hold fast what is good.” — 1 Thess. 5:21 (ESV) I teach computer science students how to program computers, and testing is a crucial component of learning to program. In fact, the modern approach to software engineering advocates a Test Driven Development where testing is simultaneously intertwined with the writing of code.…

One of the strangest features of contemporary higher education is its false egalitarianism. Teachers and students, by definition, are not equals with respect to the practice in which they are engaged, though of course they may be equals in other respects. If the student were on the same level as the teacher, he wouldn’t need…

Editor's Note: We apologize for the failure of the next two parts of the originally scheduled review essay to post over the last two days. We had some technical difficulties with their posting. We will run the full three-part review series again at a later date. It is a well-known demographic reality that, considered as…

My wife and I are co-writing a book on marriage. When I told my mother-in-law about this project, she had a simple advice that continues to stay with me in the writing process: “If you write such a book, you must be willing to open up your 마음 (ma-eum).” The Korean word, ma-eum, captures several…