When reflecting on the past and future of the evangelical mind, we thought it fitting to hark back to a time not long after Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was first published. I (Jack) remember as a young teenager visiting the Family Christian Bookstore on Cornerstone University’s campus to buy CDs; I…
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…
[Gentile Christians] are those who have become lifelong learners and lovers of others. … We have entered the story of another people, Israel, and we entered as learners.—Willie James Jennings, “The Place of Redemption: Putting the Church on the Ground” Evangelicalism has a mind-body problem. We face a widening gap between the evangelical mind (that…
According to the Bible, the Kingdom of Heaven is not of this world: it is not centered in palaces and thrones, but in the hearts and lives of God’s people (Luke 17:21). It came to earth in the symbolism of the Jewish sanctuary (the Tabernacle and the Temple) where God’s presence dwelt. It assumed a…
In this article Benjamin D. Wayman examines two representative approaches to education in late antiquity—one by the pagan emperor Julian, the other by the Christian bishop Basil—and brings these approaches to bear on Christian higher education today. Engaging the work of Arthur Holmes, Wayman suggests that contemporary Christian liberal arts institutions exemplify Basil’s view of…
This essay chronicles how a freshly minted college professor navigated the many potential passageways one encounters when teaching biology at a Christian liberal arts college. It describes a journey of initial idea evasion that eventually led to academic engagement with students who collectively sought more than just textbook knowledge. In the process, the author discovered…
Communication was a crucial element of E. Stanley Jones’s effectiveness as a missionary, spokesman, and advocate in India and across the world. From friendship with Mahatma Gandhi, his influence on Martin Luther King Jr., to his founding of the worldwide Christian Ashram movement and Round Table conferences, Jones demonstrated that interconnectedness is a necessary aspect…
If we’re going to do this,” DeAmon Harges told me, “we’re going to have to become friends.” The condition set me back on my heels. Of course, I wasn’t opposed to getting to know this Indianapolis-based nonprofit leader, rapidly becoming a national figure in community development conversations. But though I was far from reluctant to…
In this paper, Jacques Ellul’s theory of “technique” and his theology of the city are framed into a critique of New Urbanism. Against Modernism’s view of the city as a “machine for living in,” New Urbanism harks back to the ambiance of old New England towns. But far from assuring the sense of community it…
In this article we document correlations between practices once regarded as sinful, both personal and social, and medical evidence of increased morbidity and decreased longevity. We suggest that more attention needs to be given to such correlations, especially considering the escalation of costs associated with maintaining good public health, and further, that ancient and medieval…
The Bible, in René Girard’s reading, reveals the violent foundations of social order and critiques the scapegoat mechanism used to transform the conflictual mimesis of human culture into unanimous arbitrary victimage. Girard classifies as myth all those conventional narratives that have been used to justify foundational violence, concealing the guilt of the persecutors and the…
Russell Moore is one of the leading Christian voices in the public square today. At the time of this interview, Moore was serving as the President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the moral and public policy agency of the Southern Baptist Convention. Shortly after this interview, he resigned his position and…
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…
Kevin S. Reimer argues that hope contributes to the development of maturity in moral identity. The context for this discussion is a research project on compassionate love in L’Arche communities. Best known through the writings of Jean Vanier and Henri Nouwen, L’Arche is a network of Christian homes for disabled individuals and their caregiver assistants….
Jonathan B. Himes is Professor of English at John Brown University. Based on his characteristic tone of immediacy, supported by more modern colloquial diction and a host of comma splices, and especially due to his penchant for working in religious references that may resonate with Christian readers in high school or college English classes, Douglas…
“Neurodiversity’s Visionary Opportunities” creates caring definitions, establishes philosophical principles supporting the common good, offers transcendent ethics of conduct, and proposes biblical, practical life applications. Social science and neuroscience research, understood through a Scriptural lens, is joined to vocational possibilities for neurodiverse individuals. Evangelical scholars have both the legacy of forward thinking and the responsibility to…
This essay interprets poems by Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur alongside illustrative anecdotes from philosophical works by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The four texts have in common the attention they give to the human misperception of phenomena. Considered together, they make the case that occasional misperception is not a defeater for ordinary human confidence…
At the end of a busy and tiring semester, I asked blog contributors if they had a favorite faith-learning book of the year. I received suggestions from a variety of blog authors and disciplines. A book by a professor from Rice University (go owls), Elaine Howard Ecklund, received Ruth Bancewicz and Clay Carlson’s votes for…
While commending the current primary means for Christian scholars to engage members of the larger academy through publications and conference presentations, Harold Heie proposes the increased use of dialogic discourse that starts with Christian scholars seeking to develop personal relationships of mutual trust with other scholars. He provides a number of examples where this interpersonal…
One of the significant changes to come out of the COVID pandemic was the increased prevalence of working at home (or remotely at other locations). Many of us have now experienced prolonged periods of work at home, and as might be expected, people have varying opinions on how much they like it. The phenomenon of…
