My academic inspiration this summer came from an unlikely source: Apple TV’s Ted Lasso. I know, curveball, right? But I can explain. Two years ago, my husband David and I had just settled into our new home in Houston. We were both assuming new positions at a new school and, like everyone else, navigating the…
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Hank Reichman and Karen Swallow Prior’s dialogue originally printed in the Academe Blog (an AAUP publication). We have reprinted a portion of it with permission. Hank Reichman: Thank you for doing this, Karen. As I mentioned when we spoke, I am interested in your experiences in academia…
Introduction In a recent article in SEEN, the journal of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA), Beverly Roberts Gaventa poses the question, why bother with Mary? With this simple question, Gaventa identifies the attitude harbored by many Protestant Christians today. For some, however, this casual disregard moves to the level of uneasy suspicion and apprehension…
The idea that persons are or contain a nonphysical soul that is capable of existing after the destruction of the human body is customarily called “dualism.” Over the course of two millennia, the Christian tradition has been solidly in the dualist camp. Most Christians have affirmed the existence of the soul, its survival of death…
American civil discourse is in decay. It is commonplace that many citizens not only disagree but do so disagreeably. However, disagreeableness need not be a feature of our discourse. After diagnosing several instances of decayed discourse as failures of intellectual virtue, the article offers suggestions for fostering virtues—such as humility, open-mindedness, and fair-mindedness—that can help…
Jeremy Begbie believes that music is far too important to be ignored by theologians and that musicians need to understand the theological concepts that shape their assumptions about musical meaning and value. He wants us to learn to think theologically through music, and also to be theologically musical. His project is understood best not as…
Discussions of faith integration often lament the fragmentation of academic disciplines and express the desire for a theologically centered, unified synthesis of academic knowledge. Steven Jensen argues that every academic discourse is defined not only by a complex formative history and set of rules and practices, but also by a root metaphor that serves as…
This article was written prior to the financial global downturn of late 2008 and early 2009. Why do poverty, inequality, stagnation, oppression, conflict and environmental calamity plague some nations while other nations do so much better? Economist Roland Hoksbergen, geographer Janel Curry and political scientist Tracy Kuperus review and assess some of the main contemporary…
In the wake of the collapse of Enron, together with the more recent financial crises stemming from the prevalence of pragmatic ethics, an approach whose moral bankruptcy has caused financial bankruptcies, there is a growing desire to return to finding some basis for moral absolutes. In her 1958 article “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Elizabeth Anscombe, while…
An odd little book was amongst the cascading vendor enticements at last month’s educational gathering in Dallas, TX. From Walter Kim and Bryan Stephenson to Adelle Banks and Michelle Boorstein, the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities’ International Forum produced a stellar lineup for its 1100 attendees—and they proved every bit as engaging as their…
Wisdom in the Scriptures speaks explicitly about God’s day-to-day involvement in the governance of His creation. Harry Cook and John R. Wood explore how participants in the religion-science debate have developed theories about the seeming independence of nature and its laws and God’s relationship with nature. The role of chance, the meaning of suffering in…
T. M. Moore’s assessment of Pagans & Christians in the City is what any author hopes for—a review that is laudatory and charitable, but also comprehending and insightful. In this response, therefore, I might just say “Thank you” and stop there. However, Moore does call attention to some contestable choices in the book that in…
My education in film came in my 20s when a friend named Paul recognized our town’s need for an “art-house” theater: a place where foreign and independent film might provide an intelligent alternative to Hollywood fare. (That was the era before VCRs and DVDs made foreign films readily accessible.) Renting the cafeteria of a Montessori…
“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” is a theme coming out of the 1960s era that was encapsulated by the popular Crosby, Stills, and Nash song titled “Woodstock.” The implication is something has gone wrong, and we need to find a way back to life in the Garden of Eden. This is…
Philip Ryken is the President of Wheaton College, where he has served since 2010. The author or editor of more than fifty Bible commentaries and other books, Dr. Ryken provides leadership on the boards of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and the National Assocation of Evangelicals (NAE). He was recently appointed as…
Given the space limitations with which we work at Christian Scholar’s Review, unfortunately it proves impossible to commission reviews of all of the books meriting such consideration. As a result, books that often get cut include those designed to serve broad audiences and/or a wide range of educational contexts. In order to try to rectify…
Gretchen Schwarz and Jill Martin argue that contemporary Christian evangelicals often perceive American public schools as evil, and many have retrenched into their own private schools. These schools generally offer a highly traditional, narrow, even classical curriculum. In contrast, Comenius, one of the Reformation era’s outstanding scholars and educators, developed a wealth of ideas that…
Modern discussion of the liberal arts has emphasized the development of the individual critical thinker and not the art of thinking socially. Rick Kennedy summarizes the four-step craft of social thinking that was long taught in the pre-modern tradition of liberal arts. This intellectual craft was not specifically named by the ancients but is evident…
In the first installment of this blog series, I established a basic framework for how Christians ought to analyze the place of winning in sports. I argued, following St. Augustine’s claim that virtue is the right “ordering of our loves,” that winning in sport could be loved, as long as it wasn’t loved more than…
Being an athlete is often depicted as being interchangeable with striving for glory. Indeed the pinnacle of achievement in sports is almost always depicted as receiving public acclaim and recognition. The Olympics even mythologize this fact by representing spatially what is implied figuratively by placing the top athlete in each field atop a podium above…
