With today’s blog, I’m pleased to introduce the summer issue of Christian Scholar’s Review. Our Spring issue was sadly delayed, largely due to printing schedules, so I am delighted to have this issue in hand (or on screen) for many just as the academic year begins. With decades of the rhythms of the academic year much more real to me than the stroke of midnight on January 1st, I think of late August, with its clear movement toward a change in season and the academic awakening from the slower summer pace, as the real new beginning of the year. A blessed new school year to all!
For most of its history, Christian Scholar’s Review has published articles by faculty members outside bible and theology departments who engage with Christian thought to enrich the conversation on a timely or even timeless issue in their field. As scholars who publish with us know, sustaining such engagement is difficult. Those of us outside such departments may be experts in our own fields, but we find ourselves dilettantes when we ask larger questions of meaning which our fields did not prepare us to address. I am reminded of the journalist Heywood Hale Broun’s quip about his own language studies: he felt he had been a good French student, but when he got to Paris, he found that no one spoke intermediate French.1 It’s a difficult task to create a dialogue when it often feels like your expertise in theology is akin to intermediate French to scholars accustomed to more complex, knowing engagement. I’m grateful to our outstanding bible and theology editors, Josh Reeves (Samford University) and Karin Stetina (Biola University), for the work they and their reviewers do to ensure that our articles are balanced conversations.
However, every now and again, we receive a manuscript from a biblical scholar or theologian who is creating that dialogue in the other direction, drawing on another field to illuminate Christian thought. M. Daniel Carroll, R., professor of Old Testament emeritus at Wheaton College, does just that with our lead article in this issue, “How Dickens Helps Me Read the Prophets: The Contributions of Bleak House to Engaging Scripture.” In it, he writes, “Dickens alerts us to the fact that well-crafted language can stagger the mind and indict the soul. This is true of the prophets. There is more to their socioreligious, economic, and political critique, in other words, than a limited assortment of isolated passages and phrases, which is how they are commonly understood. To read the prophetic books as literature is to more fully grasp the power of their condemnations and hopes.” As Carroll demonstrates, when we read scripture as literature, we find that Dickens helps us feel the force of prophetic language rather than merely extracting moral lessons from it. There is nothing intermediate about this piece. It exemplifies a powerful, complex, and balanced dialogue.
Next, we offer a review symposium titled “In What Age Do We Find Ourselves?” Earlier in January, the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities hosted its international quadrennial conference in Grapevine, Texas. As part of the conference, John Addleman, the coalition’s director of faith integration and program evaluation, invited James Davison Hunter, the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and the executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, to deliver a keynote address titled ‘In What Age Do We Find Ourselves?” Hunter describes our moment not simply as post-Christian but as increasingly post-Enlightenment and post-liberal—a deeper cultural rupture in which shared assumptions about truth, goodness, human dignity, and the purposes of common life no longer hold. For Christian colleges and universities, his diagnosis raises urgent questions about formation. What does it mean to educate students in a distinctly Christian community when academic institutions offer narratives of grievance, anxiety, and power in place of wisdom, discernment, and hope?
We are pleased to publish Hunter’s address, along with three responses from Joseph Creech, executive director of the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities; from me (Margaret Diddams); and from Peter Mommsen, editor-in-chief at Plow Quarterly.
Creech turns Hunter’s diagnosis back toward the academy itself, asking how our institutions and vocations may have helped shape the very cultural conditions we now lament. Drawing attention to how academic life rewards mastery, competition, and individual achievement, he asks us to reconsider the kind of person our institutions are forming. His response calls Christian higher education to educate not merely for accomplishment but for community, humility, empathy, belonging, and charity.
Likewise, I argue that nihilism in higher education has filled the vacuum left by the academy’s abandonment of its larger moral and vocational purpose. More concerning, nihilism enters Christian higher education when scholarship is rewarded primarily by guild expectations. I encourage Christian academic leaders to recognize that institutional norms shape faculty scholars and to ensure that Christ-surrendered, non-nihilistic scholarship oriented toward God’s redemptive story is valued, even when academic guilds miss its worth. Lastly, I argue that such scholarship advances knowledge while also forming faculty spiritually.
In the final response, Mommsen argues that Christian intellectual institutions should meet this age not by retreating from culture but by engaging it with hope, conviction, and deeper confidence in the Christian story. He offers three practices for such engagement: resisting resentment and victimhood politics, recovering the deepest roots of the Christian faith, and bearing witness to the abundant life found in Christ. Against despair, alienation, and the will to power, he reminds us that Christ promises that another life is possible.
In his address, Hunter warned that, “For Christians, the enemy cannot be the other side. The enemy, rather, is the nihilism that insinuates itself into all of our institutions and practices.” Although, as respondents, we did not see one another’s remarks in advance, each of us called for intentional and countercultural institutional responses grounded in the Christian life—responses that cultivate flourishing rather than power, restoration rather than deconstruction, and hope rather than quiet despair.
Our final article creates an unusual dialogue between Augustine and social media marketing. In “Augustinian Insights for Social Media Marketing,” Jill R. Risner, professor of marketing at Calvin University, and Elisabeth Rain Kincaid, director of the Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University, argue that Augustine’s discussion of peace, desire, and the life of holiness can guide practitioners in the constructive development of online marketing tools and help the rest of us use them constructively. For Augustine, peace depends on rightly ordered loves: temporal goods are not evil in themselves, but they become spiritually and socially destructive when they capture our desire in ways that turn us inward, away from God and neighbor.
From this Augustinian perspective, social media becomes dangerous when it profits from disordered desire—cultivating pride, covetousness, compulsive attention, comparison, and division. Risner and Kincaid therefore call Christian marketers to pursue “good goods in the right way,” using intentional content, careful platform choices, and advocacy for reform so that social media marketing contributes to human peace rather than exploiting human restlessness. Although social media marketing is their immediate concern, the Augustinian wisdom from Risner and Kincaid extends beyond it, reminding us that many moral decisions are not simply choices between right and wrong but choices among goods that reveal, shape, and sometimes disorder our deepest desires.
This is a favorite issue for me because it highlights my hope for the journal and for Christian scholarship writ large. The two peer-reviewed articles create meaningful dialogues with unusual pairings – Dickens and Old Testament prophets, Augustine and social media. We also showcase current Christian cultural critique with James Davison Hunter’s essay. None of these are confined to a single siloed academic field, so Christians who want to engage in finding truth wherever it may be found (as it belongs to the Master) may find in this issue a moveable feast.
