Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. This famous poem by Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Yeats captures the anxieties he felt as he scanned the social horizon of his day. The forces…
I made many mistakes in my oral qualifying exam, halfway through grad school. The first was probably that I wore a double-breasted blazer at least 5 years out of style, as a committee member noted at the beginning. More substantial was the fact that I stumbled over explaining my collaborator’s techniques to the committee, one…
In my role as an Art History professor at Seattle Pacific University, I have accompanied students to Rome, Italy six times. We stay there for about a month, visiting umpteen million churches, in addition to wonderful museums, grand palazzos, and major archaeological sites. Among these sites, the churches are the real treasures - pedagogically, artistically,…

Katie KresserAugust 4, 2022
“This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you.’” - Jeremiah 30:2 (NIV) I remember as a college freshman seeing a cartoon taped on the door of one of the physics labs in Cornelia Hall at Iona College. It showed a student…

Gregory J. RummoAugust 3, 2022
If your campus is anything like mine, there has been an increasing emphasis on students completing internships during their time in college or university. A decade or two ago, students completing one internship were ahead of many of their peers, while today, many students are completing multiple internships. At my institution, there has been increasing…

Todd SteenAugust 2, 2022
This year it finally hit me. I’ve been going about self-care all wrong. I have been thorough in my pursuit of self-care practices that would chip away at the weight of professional responsibilities that comes with overseeing the needs of between 360 and 2,700 students (depending on my on-call schedule). I’ve added stretch breaks and…

Katie WindhamJuly 29, 2022
Like a lot of western Christians, I did a short-term mission trip as a teen overseas to volunteer at a school and it was a deeply transformative experience. Many of my friends' Facebook profile pictures broadcasted them beside the sweet smiling faces of children in their freshly painted schools, desks gleaming and polished. It's a…

Heather DouglasJuly 28, 2022
To read Philippa Koch’s The Course of God’s Providence in 2021 is to realize that the gap between the world of the eighteenth century and that of the twenty-first century is much smaller in some ways than a reader might have believed had the book been published only two years previously. Prior to the COVID-19…

Timothy D. HallJuly 26, 2022
“Exvangelicalism” is a relatively new term for a much older phenomenon: those who’ve been raised as evangelicals coming to realize that they no longer identify as such, and intentionally reckoning with the continuing impact of that tradition in their lives. Philosophers have not had much to say about this phenomenon – until now. These four…

Michelle PanchukJuly 22, 2022
Book Review: George Yancey, Beyond Racial Division: A Unifying Alternative to Colorblindness and Antiracism. IVP, 2022. Does George Yancey have any friends? His new book Beyond Racial Division rejects dominant models for racial engagement, an unpopular approach that clears space for a third way. In challenging colorblindness, the perspective probably held among most evangelicals, he…

Jenell ParisJuly 21, 2022
I first encountered Sherry Turkle years ago when a colleague in philosophy mentioned her to me as someone to keep an eye on. Later, I received from him a copy of one of her early books, The Second Self. Turkle’s more recent books, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, contain remarkable insights into how technology shapes…

Derek C. SchuurmanJuly 19, 2022
In part 1 of this series, I attempted to respond to a student who asked, “Where is God in Ukraine?” My answer, in part, was to appeal to the oft-neglected doctrine of common grace where God saturates our rebellious world with good gifts in the form of medical discoveries, technology, morality, science, the arts, and…

Tim MuehlhoffJuly 15, 2022
“Where is God in Ukraine?” I was set to start my lecture when a student asked this disturbing question. Her sincerity was evident and by the reaction of her classmates, the question resonated. News feeds had been filled with heartbreaking stories and images of the devastation in Ukraine. Daily we had learned of civilians being…

Tim MuehlhoffJuly 14, 2022
Evangelicals do not have a reputation for wise and irenic engagement with modern science. Scholars at The Henry Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School have been trying to change this characterization of hostile defensiveness, especially through their “Creation Project” that has brought evangelical scholarly focus to the doctrine of creation over recent years, of which…

Josh ReevesJuly 12, 2022
{The following excerpt comes from Matt Hoven, J.J. Carney, and Max Engel, On the Eighth Day: A Catholic Theology of Sport (Cascade/Wipf & Stock: Eugene, OR, 2022), 115-7. Used with permission from Wipf and Stock Publishers. Available for purchase at wipfandstock.com, Amazon.com, and elsewhere}. The vast majority of elite athletes practice superstitions—despite the fact that…



Matt Hoven, Max Engel and J.J. CarneyJuly 8, 2022
Giant kelp. It’s a species of algae that can grow over 50 meters tall, making it the largest marine algae. It’s also one of the fastest growing living things on our planet.“Giant Kelp.” SIMoN. Accessed June 13, 2022. https://sanctuarysimon.org/dbtools/species-database/id/40/macrocystis/pyrifera/giant-kelp. On its own, giant kelp is an impressive part of God’s creation. However, I’d argue that…

Abbie SchrotenboerJuly 7, 2022
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Matthew 6:1 I rarely see so many public intellectuals misunderstand the implications of a Supreme Court case as the recent Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision…

Perry L. GlanzerJuly 6, 2022
“Owning a piano does not make the pianist.” This wisdom from folklore also pertains to the fine art of parenting. Having children does not guarantee successful outcomes.Jerry Bigner and Clara Gerhardt, Parent-Child Relations: An Introduction to Parenting, 10th ed. (Pearson Publishing, 2018), 6. Hence, emotionally vested parents and coparents will go out of their way…

Clara GerhardtJuly 5, 2022
My husband and I are called by nicknames from our middle names. Needless to say, this can make for some confusing, if not frustrating, moments when legal documents are involved to prove that this is indeed the real me. However, the upside is I immediately know if it’s a salesperson on the phone if they…

Beth MadisonJune 30, 2022
Perhaps the first thing to say about Adam Stern’s book is that it demonstrates deep erudition and analytical capability in the author’s quest to interrogate the concept of survival in a theological and political sense. Stern carries out his exercise primarily through interaction with texts by the Jewish scholars Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig,…

Hunter BakerJune 28, 2022