Skip to main content
Category

Blog

Blog

On Museums and Monsters: Defining Art

What is art? I have my students answer this question every autumn, and every autumn I get a host of new answers. That’s because “art” is, and always has been, notoriously hard to define. Sometimes students’ answers revolve around the effects of art: “art is something that moves you in a certain way,” they might…
October 12, 2020
Blog

An Abusive Relationship and Race Relations

In light of recent events, our blog contributor agreed that it would be timely to repost a parable he told in April. Let me tell you a story. There was a man and a woman who were married. They were married for 15 years. But it was a horrible marriage. The husband was very abusive…
October 9, 2020
Blog

Connecting Bytes and Christian Beliefs

Technology has been a common theme in my life. The passion began early with building crystal radios and other electronic projects, then moving on to experimenting with ham radio and delighting in the world of early personal computers. My interest in technology drew me to study engineering at a large, respected, engineering school. After graduating…
October 7, 2020
Blog

Teaching During Pandemic: Help!

I’ve been teaching for a hundred years, and this one is the most difficult. Every day I receive marketing emails from textbook and educational service companies; one offered free resources to "help deliver content during this difficult time." Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not a delivery person (nor a service provider, nor a learning manager).…
October 5, 2020
Blog

The Liturgy of Lament for Second-Act Leaders

As an Industrial / Organizational Psychologist, I have spent almost 30 years studying leaders. Not so much leadership theories but leaders themselves. How do they think about being a leader? What motivates them? How do they make sense about being in this role, and how much of their identity is wrapped up in being a…
October 2, 2020
Blog

The Market Made Me Do It: Revising the Scandal

This essay appeared first at Mere Orthodoxy:  https://mereorthodoxy.com/market-made-scandal-evangelical-college/ Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind turned twenty-five last year. If we know a classic by its ability to speak across eras, one single event from this past summer is enough to assure everyone of the continuing tragic relevance of Noll’s book. In late July,…
September 30, 2020
Blog

A Little Narcissism Inside

In her summer release, President Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, describes her uncle as a “narcissist” with a complex and pathological relationship with his deceased father. Her diagnostic sequitur, though hardly original, carries the sting of coming from a family connection. In another story closer to home, a longtime Taylor University philosophy…
September 28, 2020
Blog

Celebrating Christian Creators

I recently reviewed John Bernbaum’s fantastic new book, Opening the Red Door The Inside Story of Russia's First Christian Liberal Arts University for The Review of Faith and International Affairs. After reading the book, I came to the conclusion that John Bernbaum should be celebrated as one of the great Christian creators. The book documents two decades of John’s work…
September 25, 2020
Blog

Crisis, Community, and Lament: Living During Chaotic Times

The day I am writing this post is September 11. In 2001, I was still a rookie administrator living with 200 freshmen on a Christian college campus in Southern California. The horror of that morning rippled into shock, confusion, and perplexity as the day continued. The community gathered together with care, empathy, and resolve. As stories permeated through…
September 23, 2020
Blog

What A Tale of Two Cities Can Tell Us About Injustice in America Today

“Those who cannot remember the past,’ the philosopher George Santayana, famously said, ”are condemned to repeat it.” Literature is one way of “remembering” the past in a way that exceeds the limits of our own memory and experience. If there were one work of literature that might help us today to avoid repeating a violent and painful past…
September 21, 2020
Blog

Language Learning as Spiritual Medicine for a Culture of Narcissism

Today’s post is an excerpt of a longer talk given by David Lyle Jeffrey in May 2019 at a conference sponsored by the Christian Association for World Languages (CAWL). We are thankful for the opportunity to share Dr. Jeffrey’s wisdom for the benefit of Christian scholars of all disciplines. His commitment to the importance and power…
September 18, 2020
Blog

The Poetry and Music of Science

In this blog, I write about the story of a new book, The Poetry and Music of Science. This account of the role of creativity and imagination in science, very under-emphasised in education and public discussion of science today, was motivated by my earlier search for a ‘theology of science’ articulated in the earlier (2014) book Faith and…
September 16, 2020
Blog

Toward a Christian Film Aesthetic

As co-director of the Marion E. Wade Center, the world’s most comprehensive archive of books and autographs by and about C. S. Lewis and six of his most important influencers, I have delighted in reading unpublished correspondence and manuscripts by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), whose radio plays about Jesus nurtured Lewis’s spiritual life. Among the many…
September 14, 2020
Blog

What does Christianity have to do with Economics? Three Approaches

Since most faculty are trained in thoroughly secular universities and disciplines, it can take some work to figure out what difference Christian faith can have in the practice of your discipline. I have noticed that there is a particular difficulty of this kind for economists. In this blog post, I describe the background for that…
Steven McMullen Headshot
September 11, 2020
BlogPress Release

Welcome to the Christ Animating Learning Blog

Christian Scholar’s Review is pleased to announce the launch of “Christ Animating Learning”—an interdisciplinary and interactive forum focused on the relationship the Christian faith shares with the practices of teaching and scholarship.  “Christ Animating Learning” launched Monday, with posts appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Readers can access it at https://christianscholars.com/blog/ or sign-up at https://christianscholars.com/newsletter/…
September 9, 2020
Blog

Consider the Snail: Teaching Online and Learning to Breathe

Snails, it turns out, have things to teach us, even for folk with advanced degrees. Things that could be relevant to an online course. Things that carry a faint echo of wisdom’s laughter at the delights of creation, as narrated in Proverbs 8. Things that also have to do with how we use technology for…
September 8, 2020
Blog

Teaching Culture in Covidtide

A new school year is beginning, and I’m thinking about how to teach cultural history.  There are a lot of reasons to get “meta” right now, as a cultural historian. (Specifically, I’m a professor of Art History and Visual Studies.) First, there’s mode of delivery, and the cultural implications of that. If “the medium is the…
September 2, 2020
Blog

Who Are You to Your Students? An Experiment

I am starting this year by asking students to change one of the most important liturgies of the classroom—what they call me.  As David Smith has taught us, if we want to engage in Christian teaching, we need to interrogate all of our classroom liturgies through a Christian perspective.  In this age of identity, the most important…
August 27, 2020
Blog

The Ethnic Church Attendance Gap at Christian Colleges and Universities

Recently, while analyzing interviews from seniors at our university, we came across a curious and disturbing finding.  In three consecutive interviews, non-white students talked about how they had not attended church during their time at the university, and it showed in their own admitted lack of spiritual growth and sense of belonging at the institution.  Puzzled, we…
August 24, 2020
Blog

Christ-Animating Learning: What Do We Mean?

For many years, Christian’s Scholar’s Review has proclaimed that “its primary objective is the publication of peer-reviewed scholarship and research, within and across the disciplines, that advances the integration of faith and learning…” Despite the historic use of “integration” language, we have decided to instead focus on “Christ-Animating learning.”  Why do we now propose a…
August 19, 2020