Part-way through teaching a new course on faith and pedagogy last year I noticed an emerging pattern that had not been a fully conscious part of my plan. An unanticipated trend slowly turned into a conscious strategy that threaded its way through several major topics. It started a few weeks into the semester as we…
During the last volume year the total number of submissions was sixty six—about average. Our current acceptance-to-publication timeframe is about twelve months. Our summer 2013 theme issue, “The Global Face of Christian Higher Education,” was co-edited by Janel Curry of Gordon College and Joel Carpenter of Calvin College. I am very thankful for the excellent…
Generally, prior to a decade ago, when people heard “Title IX,” they thought of women’s sports. Now, we’ve equated Title IX with sexual violence. However, the topic of Title IX should not be reduced to either of these aforementioned issues. As the law states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of…
Christian Scholar’s Review is pleased to announce “The Academic Vocation in a Post-2020 World: An Ecumenical Dialogue”—a virtual panel discussion on Saturday, November 14, 2020, from 11:00 AM EST to 12:15 PM EST. Moderated by Margaret Diddams, the recently appointed Editor for Christian Scholar’s Review, panel members include: Nancy Brickhouse – Provost, Baylor University; Gerard…
The legendary fall of Troy was precipitated by the horrific death of the priest Laocoön, whose warning not to take the Horse into the city was punished by two sea serpents strangling him and his sons. The tragic scene came vividly to life in one of antiquity’s most famous statues (c. 200 BC), characterized by…
“Christ Animated Learning” is an inspired title for this blog, for Christ the Logos (“word, thought, rationality”) is always the one who animates (from Latin anima, “spirit, breath of life”) the journey toward Truth that we call “learning.” The same Spirit who effected my conversion to Classics as a college sophomore, immersing me in the…
I am pleased to share this interview with Sarah Dawn Petrin, a Gordon University alumna with an illustrious career as a humanitarian in more than 20 countries with the United Nations and the Red Cross, and founder of Protect the People. Her new book, Bring Rain, offers a powerful, unvarnished, and inspirational look at her…
Knowles Memorial Chapel, a Neo-Renaissance structure designed by renowned architect Ralph Adams Cram and dedicated in 1932, is justly recognized as one of the nation’s most beautiful college chapels. Whether you are a member of Rollins community or a visitor to the campus, the Chapel is well worth a few minutes of exploration. I have a…
With the release of this first issue of our fifty-first volume, we celebrate fifty years of God’s faithfulness to Christian Scholar’s Review. As with any anniversary we look to our past, consider the current status of Christian scholarship, and look forward with thanksgiving and some trepidation to the next fifty years. Looking to the past,…
“Exvangelicalism” is a relatively new term for a much older phenomenon: those who’ve been raised as evangelicals coming to realize that they no longer identify as such, and intentionally reckoning with the continuing impact of that tradition in their lives. Philosophers have not had much to say about this phenomenon – until now. The Evangelical Philosophical Society sponsored the panel “Exvangelicalism and Evangelical Philosophy”…
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. –Simon Weil We have an attention problem. It’s easy to blame modern media technologies. Many have done so, and I regularly join their lament. The field of media ecology is ripe with insights about technology’s effects on our ability to purposefully attend to…
“Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is comfortable, and My burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28–30, NASB) Rest strengthens. Rest calms. Rest works! After…
Geoffrey Galt Harpham has argued that conversation about crisis is fundamental to the humanities in the United States, an insight I extend to the liberal arts more generally. Certainly, crisis-talk has spanned my own career. From internal academic anxiety over the wrecking ball of poststructuralism, to the cognate cultural wars of the eighties and nineties,…
If your Christian university does not require a substantive class on nourishing an excellent Christian marriage, it is not engaged in a key factor behind upward economic mobility. Why do I say that? The social science evidence. As Melisa Kearney, a University of Maryland economist, and author of Two-Parent Privilege, shared on a recent podcast,…
In yesterday’s post, I maintained that our talents are, just like our very lives, gifts from God. Recognizing that our lives and talents are gifts has three important implications for athletes: gifts must be cultivated, gifts are temporary, and gifts must be used well. These facts—regarding the nature and purpose of athletic gifts—are not often…
In a recent blog post, I addressed the sloppy, alarmist reporting about the state of Christian higher education in the United States. The actual trajectory of religious higher education between 2010 and 2019 involved only minuscule decline (-0.1%) and that decline was much less than the -4% enrollment decline among secular universities. In other words,…
How does a Christian university change a culture and overcome fear, differences of opinions, and a faculty body comprised of diverse Christian traditions? How does the university guard against implementing an administratively-driven, plug-and-play approach to faith and learning integration that would infringe on the faculty member’s academic freedom? The starting point for us at Samford…
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…
From Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self to Kristen DuMez’s Jesus and John Wayne, from Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood to Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s Taking America Back for God and Sarah Posner’s Unholy, a spate of illuminating (if controversial and contested) cultural histories have been published…
The world seems to be full of disasters, appearing on our TV screens and newspapers on a weekly basis. Some are clearly caused by humans: bridges fall down; buildings catch fire and incinerate many people; dams collapse and drown folk; terrorism and war inflict terrible suffering and atrocities. Others seem to be arbitrary, just “acts…
