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…
I recently reviewed John Bernbaum’s fantastic new book, Opening the Red Door The Inside Story of Russia’s First Christian Liberal Arts University for The Review of Faith and International Affairs. After reading the book, I came to the conclusion that John Bernbaum should be celebrated as one of the great Christian creators. The book documents two decades of John’s work…
Christian Scholar’s Review is pleased to announce the launch of “Christ Animating Learning”—an interdisciplinary and interactive forum focused on the relationship the Christian faith shares with the practices of teaching and scholarship. “Christ Animating Learning” launched Monday, with posts appearing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Readers can access it at https://christianscholars.com/blog/ or sign-up at https://christianscholars.com/newsletter/…
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…
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…
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…
Today’s world demands that we prepare learners to confront worldview implications for living in a multicultural and pluralistic world. One way we are doing this is through cross-cultural programs, domestically and internationally. While Christian higher education is increasing the number of students in these programs, Naomi Ludeman Smith, D.Min., asks if our institutions can show…
Both Aristotle and Tolkien are authors of short works seemingly concentrated on one form of literary art. Both works contain references which seem to extend further than that single art and offer insights into the worth and purpose of art more generally. Both men understand the relevant processes of mind of the artist in a…
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,”…
Robert Priest is Professor of Intercultural Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Esther Cordill practices clinical psychology. James Evinger and Richard Darr misunderstand and misconstrue two brief references in our article. They wrongly imply that these references were central. They fail to address the topic that was central. They instead launch a discussion of…
The publisher and editors of the Christian Scholar’s Review are pleased to announce the recipient of its annual award for best article. The winner of the Charles J. Miller Christian Scholar’s Award for volume 43 is Kevin D. Miller, professor of Communication, Huntington University, Huntington, Indiana. His article, “Reframing the Faith-Learning Relationship: Bonhoeffer and an…
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…
I. When Holden Caulfield decides to kill some time by going to see a war movie, he reflects that “It was probably the worst thing I could’ve done.” The movie is about an English soldier “that was in the war and loses his memory in the hospital and all,” a soldier who falls in love…
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…
R. Scott Smith is Professor of Ethics and Christian Apologetics at Biola University. In 2013, Amos Yong surveyed the status of evangelical higher education, in part with a focus on integration. As he observed, the dominant model amongst many, if not most, faculty in evangelical institutions “fuses scholarship and teaching under the label of faith-learning…
The love of wisdom needs the wisdom of love. Let me say what this means and why it matters. I begin with a poem by Miriam Pederson titled “Hold Your Horses.”[1] Lasso truthlike a run-away steerand you will find its veinsrunning cold. Approach it like a loverwith a ribbon for her hairand truth, in time,will…
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…
[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…
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…
The primary claims of the first edition of George Marsden’s book, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, remain as salient and persuasive as they were thirty years ago: First, Christian academics may—I will argue should—be doing their scholarship from a Christian point of view (more shortly on what that might mean in practice), and second,…
