Review Essays

Mark A. Peters is professor of music and director of the Center for Teaching and the Good Life at Trinity Christian College. He is president of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music and book review co-editor for Christian Scholar’s Review. Whatever you learn, remember: the learning must make you more, not less, human.—Elie Wiesel…

Not long before the last U.S. presidential election, on my pre-dawn bicycle ride to work, a companion Southern Californian road user in a car took umbrage at my having the audacity to signal to change lanes to turn left. Lit up like a Christmas tree, I was clearly visible, but my not staying to the…

By and large, the discipline of political science does not take religion seriously. The typical member of this particular scholarly guild sees religious belief and affiliation not as causes of political action, but rather as consequences of political or economic interests. Religion, at most, is a device that savvy elites use to hoodwink gullible masses…

Charles Taylor identifies a shift in Western culture in the 18th century around the idea of “authenticity,” a shift toward valuing individual people for their original perspectives, their unique ways of being human. As Western thinking was making this shift, a brother and sister in northern England began packing picnic lunches and wandering around some…

“Be gracious to me, O Lord,” the Psalmist writes, “for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also.” He does not hold back. The agony of grief that drives him to poetry and song provides us with a rich fund of words that still serve us in our sorrow:…

Rebecca C. Burwell is a faculty member at Chicago Semester, where she teaches courses in race, social justice, and vocation. In 1942, during the Second World War, British academic William Beveridge developed a report entitled “Social Insurance and Allied Services” that identified five social issues that the British government would need to address once the…

Mackenzi Huyser serves as Executive Director of Chicago Semester. What is the Cost of Segregation in Chicago? This question was explored in a March 2017 report released by the Urban Institute in partnership with the Metropolitan Planning Council.Gregory Acs, Rolf Pendall, Mark Treskon, Amy Khare, “The Cost of Segregation: National Trends and the Case of…

Jeremy S. Stirm is a military chaplain and independent scholar and taught most recently as an adjunct instructor for Truett Seminary. He served two tours of duty, one in Afghanistan with Special Forces and one in Iraq as a chaplain. Since the dawn of war, the physical wounds of war have been readily acknowledged, and…

Introduction G. K. Chesterton once provocatively quipped, “It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.”G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered (New York: John Lane Company, 1909), 96. C. S. Lewis similarly stated, I do not think that the life…

Don W. King is Professor of English at Montreat College. Twenty-five years ago most books published on C. S. Lewis fell into two broad categories. On the one hand, many books extolled Lewis as a spiritual mentor, praising him for his cerebral engagement with a culture that often dismissed Christians as intellectual lightweights. On the…

Jordan J. Ballor is a research fellow at the Acton Institute and serves as executive editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. He is also associate director of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research at Calvin Theological Seminary. “We have been so buffeted by international hatred, so discomfited by an almost masochistic domestic…

Hans Madueme is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College. North American evangelical academic institutions are at a fork in the road. Developments in the natural sciences have raised, and continue to raise, difficult questions about the viability of traditional formulations of Christian doctrine. Mainline scholars have long made their peace with the modern…

Tom Copeland is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Biola University. Teaching at Christian liberal arts colleges, I have wondered if there is a role for myth or fiction in teaching truths about the social realm, and whether as a result of encountering such stories, students might respond with more enthusiasm to great ideas…

Trisha Posey is Director of the Honors Scholars Program and Associate Professor of History at John Brown University. In May 2013, I was part of a group of faculty from John Brown and Cornerstone Universities that visited Uganda Christian University (UCU) in Mukono, Uganda to participate in workshops on the integration of faith, learning, and…

Rick Kennedy is the secretary of the Conference on Faith and History and Professor of History at Point Loma Nazarene University. His The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather is to be published by Eerdmans in the spring of 2015. “Hagiography” is a term that college professors transformed into a pejorative. No…

John W. Wright is Professor of Theology and Christian Scripture at Point Loma Nazarene University. Introduction We live in a world assembled to overcome the instabilities arising out of World War II. The dominant post-War narrative has understood the “Good War” as an ideological battle between democracy and totalitarianism.“The Allies cause has been dressed up…

Jeffrey P. Bouman is the Director of the Service-Learning Center at Calvin College. My neighbor Don strolled by my house one early evening last June while I was out front in my urban neighborhood, reading the newspaper. We shot the breeze, talked about meeting new neighbors, the weather, the ethics of drone strikes, and Don’s…

Todd C. Ream is Professor of Higher Education at Taylor University, a research fellow with Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and the co-author (along with Perry L. Glanzer) most recently of The Idea of a Christian College: A Reexamination for Today’s University (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013). The university has collapsed into an entity…

Eric Miller is Professor of History and Humanities at Geneva College. The penultimate track of the CD that accompanies Ken Burns’ 1994 film Baseball features the actor Amy Madigan reading a quotation from The Sporting News. “Great is baseball,” she intones. “The national tonic. The revival of hope. The restorer of confidence.”Baseball: A Film by…