“A man may have to die for his country, but no man must, in an exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.”…
A few years back, one of my literature classes read Misha Nogha’s “Chippoke Na Gomi,” an intriguing and provocative science fiction story exploring the repercussions of atomic weaponry and the responsibilities we have to one another. Misha’s story is experimental and its plot hard to nail down, mostly because it dwells somewhere between realism and…
Perry Glanzer begins his ambitious and stimulating book with a story that is both uncannily prescient and deeply disturbing. He tells us that the impetus for his work dates from the 1990s when he spent an extended period of time in Russia and Ukraine studying post-communist moral education. Again and again in Russia, teachers confessed,…
Perry Glanzer begins his ambitious and stimulating book with a story that is both uncannily prescient and deeply disturbing. He tells us that the impetus for his work dates from the 1990s when he spent an extended period of time in Russia and Ukraine studying post-communist moral education. Again and again in Russia, teachers confessed,…
A self-identifying evangelical Christian college that welcomed prominent theologically conservative and liberal Protestants scholars and pastors to campus for a Bible conference might defy the expectations of many today. But this happened annually at Grove City College during the tenure of its founding president Isaac Ketler’s annual Bible conference in the late nineteenth and early…
Kurt C. Schaefer is Professor of Economics at Calvin College. A young economist working at a new school writes a 696-page book. It is based on fifteen years of research codifying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century probate and tax records. This does not sound like a recipe for commercial success. Yet within a month Capital in the…
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…
Coming back together for education this Fall is a long process that is more a marathon than a sprint—and we’ve already run uphill for a year and a half. This leads to the problems we’re now facing, described in Part 1. How do we continue to navigate these conflicts, divisions, and needs, without enough staff…
In this essay Heidi Oberholtzer Lee argues that we need to teach and model in our classrooms the importance of reading with humility. This serves as a corrective to the promotion of reading strategies that primarily emphasize negativity and scorn, strategies that have been popularized by misapplications of Paul Ricoeur ’s “hermeneutic of suspicion.” More…
In July 2021, Tim Muehlhoff and Rick Langer had a lengthy conversation with Theon Hill, a communications scholar whose research delves into the interface between the Black community and white evangelicalism, writing on the relationship between rhetoric and social change—particularly as related to race, culture, and American politics. He has written on the topic of…
A few days after Easter, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled “Our Many Jesuses.” The blurb below the headline read: “At a time of shrinking church membership, Jesus remains a uniquely powerful and popular figure in American culture. The great divide is over what he stands for.” Next to the headline were Warhol-esque…
As Christian educators and their institutions feel increasingly overwhelmed by unprecedented challenges yet champion ideal concepts, Daniel J. Treier highlights the neglect of human finitude in theological approaches to education. He briefly maps out the major approaches and sketches the theological history of finitude before exploring the concept in Ecclesiastes. In light of this biblical…
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…
Until recently, art has commonly been treated as ancillary to the educational mission and intellectual discourse that are at the core of Christian higher education. Using the exhibition Charis: Boundary Crossings—Neighbors, Strangers, Family, Friends as a case study, Curator and Project Director Rachel Hostetter Smith argues that art has a distinct capacity to serve as…
William Shakespeare’s references to biblical material have been much written about, but little attention has been given to a connection between Macbeth and the New Testament Epistle of James. James addresses issues common to secular and sacred literature—issues such as the nature of wisdom, the conditions of unity, the difference between appearance and reality, a…
Does Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind still have relevance today, more than two decades after its publication in 1994? As a historian who has spent 16 years in a Christian college affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) and a longtime member of evangelical congregations (for the past 16…
Miguel de Unamuno identifies with Christian thinkers Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaardand includes them in a list of thinkers who embody his tragic sense of life. Unamuno embraces their suspicion of certainty and with them questions classical proofs for God’s existence. Nevertheless, Jan E. Evans argues in this essay that Unamuno’s understanding of the role…
“My song is love unknown, my Saviour’s love to me; love to the loveless shown, That they might lovely be.” It is common practice in many Christian denominations to reflect on the Passion during Lent. For instance, in the Catholic Church, there are the Stations of the Cross. Another widespread practice, across Christian denominations, is…
Writings in theological discussions of beauty evince certain problematic tendencies with respect to “spirit” language. Whether it is the paucity of such language or an idiosyncratic usage of it, “spirit” language is often evacuated of specifically pneumatological content. In this essay W. David O. Taylor attempts to re-conceptualize the Holy Spirit’s role with respect to…
Everyone knows that American Protestantism generally divided into fundamentalist and liberal camps in the 1920s. And many people know that fundamentalism derives from The Fundamentals, early-twentieth-century tracts that reduced the rich doctrinal heritage of Christianity down to five points of do-or-die orthodoxy. Neither of these putative facts, however, is true. This paper shows that The…
