Todd V. Cioffi is an Assistant Professor of Congregational and Ministry Studies at Calvin College and Peter J. Snyder is an Associate Professor of Business at Calvin College. Wong, Baker, and Franz’s essay on business education as formation is most welcomed. We have been teaching a first-year interim course for the past three years very…
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…
Regardless of how one defines it, American evangelicalism is at a crossroads. The last quarter of the twentieth century was replete with signs of prosperity. Many churches, parachurch organizations, universities, and seminaries grew at unprecedented rates. Some analysts argued that the individuals populating those institutions were contributing to an intellectual renaissance. For example, in the…
Russell Moore and Karen Swallow Prior may not fit the stereotype of an “exvangelical.” Unlike the angry twenty-something who takes to social media to announce that they’re resigning from church, Moore and Prior both devoted several decades of their adult lives to serving the church through teaching, writing, and (in Moore’s case) denominational administration. Both…
Author’s Note: By the kind permission of both journals’ editors, a version of this piece with the title “Gabriel’s Word to Woman” is also being published today by Church Life Journal. I am especially grateful for this gesture of Christian solidarity on the Feast of the Annunciation, 2022, the day on which Pope Francis is…
Let me begin by warmly thanking Amy Black, Matthew Kaemingk, and Paul Weithman for their generous and challenging comments on my essay, “Fidelity in Politics.” I have found it both enjoyable and instructive to reflect on what they say. In my response to their comments, I will begin with comments on some intellectual issues that…
Creative individuals in every era have produced works that inspire and provoke their fellow citizens, challenging them to both confront distorted realities and reimagine better lives. Artifacts that have stood the test of time and critical reception usually elicit multiple interpretations among contemporaries and are reinterpreted by future generations. Ulti-mately, said works were eventually embraced…
Ellen Seidman is on a crusade. Her efforts have caught the attention of thousands of YouTube viewers, educators, 250,000 petition signers, and even past presidents such as President Obama. Her crusade doesn’t focus on ending poverty, racism, global warming, or sex trafficking. Her crusade is to end the use of a single word. Seidman and…
I have been concerned for quite some time that works of Christian scholarship are not ideally accessible in the marketplace of ideas. Early in my career, I documented that evangelical literature was often not available digitally, and I advocated for publishers and others to address such deficiencies. Fifteen or so years later, it is much…
After weeks of shooting footage at a town nearby for his latest project, legendary director Martin Scorsese has finally wrapped up filming. This Advent marks the tenth anniversary of another work of Scorsese’s and my favorite Christmas movie: his Oscar-winning Hugo (2011). Although neither Santas nor Scrooges, neither mangers nor mistletoe appear in the film,…
Bill was one of my very best friends in college. We went to music school together, we played in bands, and we pledged a fraternity. Bill’s daughter, Kaylie is a graduate of the university where I currently teach and sang in our university choir. So as Bill and his wife Shelia would attend Kaylie’s choir…
Recently I had a vivid reminder of the value in the breadth of a liberal arts education. My son, who is a computer science major, has become a fan of live theater. When he texted me the title of an upcoming play that we could see together with my other son (a music therapy major),…
Reviewed by James S. Spiegel, Philosophy and Religion, Taylor University A long-standing criticism of open theism—at least since the emergence of the movement in the 1990s—is its failure to adequately account for God’s permission of evil. Why would God refrain from stopping rapes, murders, and child abuse when he could easily do so? The standard…
In May of 2021, I finished my thirtieth year as an English professor and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University. Over the years, I have marked my growth as a professor by the continual research, publishing, and speaking I have done in my areas of specialization. I have marked it as well by my…
After hearing repeatedly about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that OpenAI made available a few months ago, I finally decided to give the system a test drive in mid-February. I chose to engage ChatGPT in an exchange about the relationship between Christians and libraries—a subject area on which I have written and presented repeatedly, especially…
In the description of Darwin’s life and work, a common assumption is that he gradually lost all belief in God, eventually becoming an atheist. In this article we demonstrate that, while Darwin became more and more sceptical of some aspects of traditional Christian beliefs, he nevertheless saw himself as standing in the natural theology tradition,…
In Leap of Faith (Paramount Pictures: 1992), Steve Martin offers a modern take on Elmer Gantry as conman and revivalist Jonas Nightengale. In the movie, Nightengale’s bus breaks down while in the small town of Rustwater, Kansas. As he waits for it to be fixed, he decides to run a series of tent meetings complete…
This series is adapted from a chapter in Keith Loftin’s Rekindling an Old Light: The Virtue and Value of Christ-Shaped Liberal Arts Learning (High Bridge Books, 2022, published in conjunction with Moral Apologetics Press). Why should Christians read literature from a broad array of writers and thinkers? As our last installment put it, “If literature…
This essay was published in 2012 in the book Practically Human: College Professors Speak from the Heart of Humanities Education edited by Gary Schmidt & Matthew Walhout (Grand Rapids: Calvin College Press, 2012, 133-145). It asks why we invest time and resources in learning other languages and seeks to look further than pragmatic motivations based…
