Reviewed by Emily S. Bosscher, First Year Experience, Trinity Christian College Over the past five years, the student population on college campuses has changed. Current students are equal parts less ready for college and adulthood but highly empathetic toward others around them, indecisive and yet yearning for mentoring relationships, filled with anxiety and the fear…
Tolkien’s short but poignant work Leaf by Niggle is a rich resource for speculation ranging from Platonic metaphysical themes to biographical insights into the intersection of his personal and professional lives. Although the story was composed earlier, it was sent off in 1944 in response to a request from the editor of The Dublin Review…
I believe the most important issue in twenty-first-century Christian liberal arts is “How shall we then read the Bible?” With rampant out-sourcing, on-lining, under-training, and down-sizing in General Education, along with myopic careerism in parents, administrators, and professors, fewer and fewer Christian colleges and universities show clear interest in teaching Bible-reading as a distinctive and…
Reformational philosophy is a philosophical tradition that emerged in the Netherlands during the late nineteenth century as an innovative re-articulation of Dutch Calvinism, a strand of the historical reformed and Presbyterian tradition of Christianity.[1] This innovative intellectual renewal of Calvinism, originating with the theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper, began to flower in the early twentieth…
Amid the constant reminders throughout 2017 of the need to reckon collectively with racism as a system embedded within the American social, political, economic, and cultural landscape, two important collections emerged offering reflective tools for this work. Acclaimed author and national correspondent for The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power: An American…
A Scottish clergyman once described Australia as the “most godless place under heaven.” Although his comment was ill-informed, as a provocative statement it clues us in to something of a popular sentiment regarding the religiosity of Australia. Yet contrary to popular impression, it can be forcefully argued that Christianity in general, and evangelicalism in particular,…
As the cultural influence of evangelical Christianity in the West wanes, the lack of consensus among evangelicals about their own identity grows. In this paper, I will propose that evangelicals need a more robust theological, biblical, and Christological account of hope that will, in turn, inform an ecclesiology centered on the living Word. Toward that…
Perry Glanzer, Jonathan Hill, and Byron Johnson have produced one of the most valuable studies of this generation on the problem of meaning and purpose among undergraduate students. It belongs alongside other books on the subject by Sharon Daloz Parks and Christian Smith. The book’s first strength—a primary one—is its tight focus on a particular…
In an age in which higher education options are increasingly commodified to match the hegemonic forces of today, it is encouraging to have voices like Ryan McIlhenny’s observing the higher education terrain. In his book Reforming the Liberal Arts, McIlhenny offers insightful perspectives and a timely diagnostic of the state of higher education. As the…
I’d like to propose a thought experiment — one that may transform your understanding of something you see every day. Thought experiments can change the world, or at least your understanding of it. Einstein’s great scientific breakthroughs started with a thought experiment, something like this one. For our experiment, imagine how a mirror works. If…
This summer I will take on the responsibility of chair of the Department of Computer Science at Calvin University. This part-time administrative role comes with many responsibilities: guiding the hiring and reappointment of faculty, scheduling classes, ensuring academic quality, managing budgets, and generally keeping the “trains running on time” in the department. To be sure,…
In the thirty-ninth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Charles W. Pollard, President of John Brown University. Pollard opens by sharing how his vocation was shaped by the study of law and the study of English. Each practice of study allowed Pollard to cultivate his gifts in ways that made it possible for him to navigate the created order while also being of service to others. He then explores how mentors such as his father, fellow students, and teachers contributed to his vocational formation. Pollard shares how those seemingly disparate forms of vocational formation converged through service he offered on various organizational boards and now for over two decades has offered as president of John Brown University. As a president, Pollard discusses how he views himself as a scholar-practitioner who, despite the demands for his time, still regularly co-teaches a course. He also discusses how he views philanthropy as a practice of storytelling and board service as the cultivation of fiduciary community. Pollard then closes by sharing how the university and the Church can be of even greater service to one another in the years to come.
Editor’s note: What follows is a letter that the author wrote to his daughter at the outset of her college search. Dear Madeleine, As you continue to prepare for college, I want to share a bit of my mind and heart, not for the particular university you attend, but for the kind of university you…
The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship became an instant classic when it was released by Oxford University Press in 1997, but I must admit that I always disliked the title. While it is an effective attention-grabber, the text itself is far more nuanced and polite than the title presages. Additionally, the word “outrageous” conveys neither…
A real renaissance is hard to come by. No birth is easy, let alone a rebirth. But that’s what American evangelicals experienced—that’s what they accomplished—from the mid-twentieth century through the opening decades of the twenty first: renaissance. Joel Carpenter describes the initial stirrings of this vast movement, in the aftermath of the 1925 Scopes Trial, with…
In Priests of History, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker diagnoses a partial cause of the identity crisis currently plaguing Western culture, generally, and the Western Church, particularly. We do not know ourselves because we have neglected the past. We are “ahistorical,” a term used by Irving-Stonebraker to describe the loss of “meaningful engagement with, and connection to, history”…
The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship became an instant classic when it was released by Oxford University Press in 1997, but I must admit that I always disliked the title. While it is an effective attention-grabber, the text itself is far more nuanced and polite than the title presages. Additionally, the word “outrageous” conveys neither…
The Bible is silent about the existence of life on other worlds. With the exception of the angelic host—both good and evil—nowhere in Scripture is it explicitly stated that there are other races of beings anywhere in the universe that might give rise to UFOs. Genesis simply states God created celestial objects, “to divide the…
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres – Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière – WGA11837 – Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière – Wikipedia The French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a beautiful embalmer of royalty. His paintings of emperors and aristocrats are as ravishing as they are uncanny, with their rubbery limbs, elongated necks and bovine eyes. His portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere,…
Yesterday’s post unpacked the problematic character of modern positivist Christian conceptualization and prioritization of truth. Though truth undoubtably matters enormously, it was proposed that absolute truth about metaphysical matters is not attainable, that assertions of propositional truth claims are prone to exercising power and producing interpersonal alienation, and that in profound experiential (not necessarily epistemological)…
