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In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, the character Lucien keeps a library of “every story that has ever been dreamed … novels their authors never wrote, or never finished, except in dreams.”Gaiman, Neil. "Season of Mists, Vol. 4." The Sandman (1992), p. 40. One shelf, presumably that of British authors, holds The Return of Edwin Drood by Charles…

Whatever rises must fall. Birds return to the forests of their birth, and salmon to the place of their spawning. Elephants (mythically) and humans, too, try to go home to die. Much of Creation is departure and return – but return in a different light. It is return, perhaps, with new maturity. Or return with…

Some years ago, I was sitting in my campus office minding my own business when the phone rang. It turned out to be Matt, a student who had been in a sequence of required core German courses that I had taught a few years earlier. He seemed breathless with excitement. It quickly emerged that he…

This article initially appeared in Current. I was on a train heading from Alexandria to Cairo. Next to me sat my friend Grace, a fellow student in the American master’s program we were just finishing. She was a Kenyan who had a radiant smile and a prominent accent that sent her English dancing and curling…

Our students are often our best teachers. Their actions often expose the ungodly perspectives and habits that have accumulated on us like barnacles on a ship. I encountered two stories while coding interviews from Baylor students that reminded me that I have some barnacles from difficult experiences about loving the unlovable.   If I had been…

Herman Bavinck was a late 19th and early 20th century theologian whose work has been attracting renewed attention by Christian scholars. A 2020 book published by Baker Academic about his life titled Bavinck: A Critical Biography, was written by James Eglinton, the Meldrum Senior Lecturer in Reformed Theology at the University of Edinburgh. What follows…

As many of us return to physical campuses this fall, mostly without masks, we are following the advice of classic sociologists: humans need proximity. It’s worth the trouble to regain this aspect of pre-pandemic life. As for me, I anticipate seeing students again with joy, but being on campus also brings the strong possibility of…

Editor's Note: Due to an early morning link problem with the e-mail sent Thursday, we are resending Katie Kressar's post Friday, July 23rd as well.  In addition, the Christ Animating Learning Blog will take a one week vacation next week. We will return on August 2nd.  Thanks, PLG Like many academics, I’m a small-town kid…

Universities, including Christian ones, have become quite comfortable with what some might describe as the “virtue” of honor. Although we may instinctively classify it as a favorable trait, honor—as it exists on college campuses today—has a troubled backstory. What is more, today’s faculty and administrators who esteem honor may not know about its contentious history.…

What I Love about South Korea Study Abroad, and Why It Might Not Be the Same Again My home state of Washington just declared a “full re-opening” and a return to a (new) normal. As a result, I can see relief on the faces of those around me as we Washingtonians attempt to remember what…

I have designed my ethics class to interweave ethical reflection (theory) with formation (practice), in part by thematically pairing readings with spiritual exercises. One such pairing includes Aquinas’s account of the virtue of love (Summa theologiae II-II q. 25-27) and a week of repeated contemplation of the apostle Paul’s hymn of love in I Corinthians…

In teaching Biblical studies, I have come to view the integration of faith and learning less as a movement from doing to becoming and more as a process from being to becoming. It is less a movement from something to another, and more a maturation process, the transformation of one’s identity, brought about through the…

In a post engagingly entitled “Academic Freedom: From Ram-skit to Bull-dung,” Crystal Downing relates how a professor bragged about telling students, “Christianity is ‘bull-dung’ and that’s not opinion; it’s fact.” My immediate thought was that this was indeed an inspired metaphor for the faith whose God was born in a stable. Like the crown of thorns,…

The academic year 2020-2021 marked the 50th anniversary of the founding of Christian Scholars Review (CSR). CSR was born in 1970 out of an earlier academic journal, The Gordon Review, which was created by Gordon College faculty. The first issue of The Gordon Review was published in February 1955 under Lloyd F. Dean, the journal’s…

It’s already July, and while for many people July means summer is just getting started, most college professors are already starting to think about the new school year. The start of a new school year is always nostalgic for me. I have loved school all my life—which is why I never wanted to leave it.…

When the Moravian bishop and education reformer John Amos Comenius died in 1670, he was just a few chapters short of completing his 7-volume General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs (De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica). This ambitious work ranged across a vast array of topics including philosophy, theology, linguistics, education, politics, and…

Ellen Seidman is on a crusade. Her efforts have caught the attention of thousands of YouTube viewers, educators, 250,000 petition signers, and even past presidents such as President Obama. Her crusade doesn’t focus on ending poverty, racism, global warming, or sex trafficking. Her crusade is to end the use of a single word. Seidman and…

"Hey, I heard somewhere that you wrote a book about math and your faith. Having never understood how a rational person can possibly subscribe to the Christian dogma (except for having some strong, over-riding subconscious need, perhaps), I'm curious about it, although if it all comes down to ‘faith,’ well, I've never had any idea…

The lackluster Department of Labor April jobs report took just about everyone by surprise: the US economy showed a net increase of only 266,000 nonfarm jobs. With the country opening up after the winter’s lockdowns, some estimates projected that the total would be closer to a million new jobs.  Did this mean that the economy…

If you follow the latest science news, whether it’s a newsfeed from Science Daily or a casual listen to Ira Flatow on Friday afternoons, you may have learned that Earth, indeed, has a pulse. As reported in the journal Geoscience Frontiers, rigorous statistical analysis for the timing of 89 major geological events of the past…