If you follow the latest science news, whether it’s a newsfeed from Science Daily or a casual listen to Ira Flatow on Friday afternoons, you may have learned that Earth, indeed, has a pulse. As reported in the journal Geoscience Frontiers, rigorous statistical analysis for the timing of 89 major geological events of the past…
Mary Quinn, Laura Foote, and Michele Williams argue that the growth in online learning and in the number of adult students provides opportunities for Christian colleges and universities to reach a larger segment of this population. The authors note that with this opportunity, care must be taken to keep the integration of faith and learning…
Randal Rauser argues that Focus on the Family’s popular lay-worldview curriculum entitled The Truth Project™fails to provide a true Christian worldview education, and instead evinces the marks of indoctrination. He begins with the core problem that that the curriculum encourages simplistic binary categories which distort the issues and inhibit the student from developing skills of…
“Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” opens John S. Feinberg in Four Views on Heaven (23). Trying to circumvent, downplay, or ignore our mortality, as well as demurring to talk candidly about death, has bedeviled humanity from time immemorial, satirized by the likes of Monty Python’s classic “Parrot Sketch” and…
Scholars at Christian institutions have inherited from the broader academy an archival definition of knowledge that tends to obscure relationships between academic scholarship and broader human enterprises. This essay builds upon and extends the work of Ernest Boyer and others who have advocated for a stronger link between scholarship and human communities. It argues that…
For anyone familiar with the scholarship on vocation, Frederick Buechner’s ubiquitous definition that “the place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” is hard to miss. Those of us engaged in the teaching of vocation have often implicitly or explicitly favored the “deep gladness” angle, encouraging…
For anyone familiar with the scholarship on vocation, Frederick Buechner’s ubiquitous definition that “the place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” is hard to miss. Those of us engaged in the teaching of vocation have often implicitly or explicitly favored the “deep gladness” angle, encouraging…
Why does the Bible exist? Whereas many introductory textbooks explore the “Four W’s” of inquiry (who, what, when, and where), Jacob L. Wright seeks to answer why a tiny nation over the course of several centuries produced a prolific and enduring corpus of texts. Setting aside answers one might expect from a confessional setting (“because…
Why does the Bible exist? Whereas many introductory textbooks explore the “Four W’s” of inquiry (who, what, when, and where), Jacob L. Wright seeks to answer why a tiny nation over the course of several centuries produced a prolific and enduring corpus of texts. Setting aside answers one might expect from a confessional setting (“because…
As a biblical studies professor at a Reformed, liberal arts college, David Crump has observed the tendency for Reformed folk to allow debates over confessional interpretations to stand in place of a robust engagement with Scripture. Crump’s own denomination requires all church leaders, including college faculty, to sign a pledge called the “Covenant for Officebearers,”…
In this reflection, the author shares some insights he has found in Kuyper that can inform his discipline of computer science and engineering. He begins with a critique of a speculative idea Kuyper proposed about how the “greater things than these” referred to in John 14 might refer to technology. The reflection then presents five…
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…
Back in 1996, my husband and I had a heated debate over the former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan’s use of the term “irrational exuberance” to explain the bull stock market at that time. He agreed with Greenspan that irrationality was the only explanation for some of the ridiculously inflated price to earnings ratios,…
How do we know Jesus was a woman? Answer: because, even after he was dead he had to get up and serve people. Some context may be helpful. I was the only man in a graduate seminar on feminist rhetoric. Along with six other Ph.D. students we were part of a list serve and often…
When is illumination, as light shined upon knowledge, no more than sound and fury—signifying nothing? Are there times when illumination is even perilous? I have been on a tear this summer reading books whose copyrights have expired, allowing me to download them for free. I recently read the 1896 novel, “The Damnation of Theron Ware;…
My husband and I are called by nicknames from our middle names. Needless to say, this can make for some confusing, if not frustrating, moments when legal documents are involved to prove that this is indeed the real me. However, the upside is I immediately know if it’s a salesperson on the phone if they…
I can remember the first time Sabbath became real to me. Sure, I had learned about it in Sunday School as a child or even heard professors emphasize its importance in my transition to graduate school. But certainly, I didn’t really need it. I was able to get things done and maintain both a positive…
One of the exercises that I often have both classroom students and survey respondents do is to prioritize their identities. I first ask them to consider the range of identities they might apply to themselves, and then I ask them to rank their top three. I find the answers produce significant clarity about my audience,…
Reviewed by Charles Andrews, English, Whitworth University The hoopla in the Charles Dickens bicentenary has sustained a wealth of publications popular and scholarly on this most distinctly English of the great English writers. Gary L. Colledge contributes to this celebration a book that is a curious blending of scholarly intervention and popular plea to Christians…
Bethany Keeley-Jonker and Craig Mattson notice that some of their best speech students practice a delivery so controlled it feels uncanny. This essay traces such “zombie speech” not to students’ worldview assumptions but to affective norms in conventional speech pedagogy. The essay appropriates Christian theology to reorient the practice of speech in keeping with a…
