My own experience is that churchgoers, after hearing that I teach students how to speak for a living, usually do one of two things: they make a joke about how I must be evaluating their diction as they sip their coffee in the fellowship hall, or they offer up an enthusiastic variant on the phrase,…
In the preface to her recent book on theological education, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier describes some of the repeating patterns that she experienced during her childhood as a member of a Latin@ church in New York. In her church, children were drawn into ministry early as ushers, visitors of the sick, assistants with communion, deacons, and Sunday…
I have spent the majority of my training and professional career in large public universities. In fact, from kindergarten through PhD and the first thirteen years of my academic career were in public institutions. So I received little training on faith integration and Christ-animated learning during those periods. However, when I arrived at Samford University…
Reviewed by Roger Ward, Philosophy, Georgetown College At first glance this text seems eclectic. Fiddes places critical post-modern philosophy in conversation with Christian doctrine and uses both as a basis for a constructive theology that incorporates the wisdom literature in Ancient Israel. According to Fiddes, our contemporary setting, which he describes as the late-modern context,…
Over the decades, Christian environmental exploration and activism have focused on some issues far more than others. Interest in international missions, the continuation of farming as an honored profession in many Christian communities, and the availability of clear Biblical guidance have driven a solid and thoughtful presence in the realms of food production and sustainable…
“Someone designed the furnaces of the Nazi death camps.” With this sentence, Roger Forsgren opens his article titled “The Architecture of Evil”. Although it was Hitler and his henchmen who unleashed death and destruction during the Second World War, it required railways, factories, warehouses, and machinery to enable the war effort. The article goes on…
In the 1980s, I attended the Simon Greenleaf School of Law and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I knew that the professors under whom I sat at these two institutions— including John Woodbridge, Wayne Grudem, D. A. Carson, Gleason Archer, Harold O. J. Brown, Harold Lindsell, and Carl F. H. Henry—composed a remarkable list of evangelical…
When visitors enter the museum at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, which archives work about and by C.S. Lewis and six of his British influencers, they are treated to an eye-popping display of 53 book covers from famous works: The Two Towers from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Lewis’s Perelandra, Sayers’s first Lord Peter…
Reviewed by Edward B. Davis, History of Science, Messiah College This book by Stuart S. Peterfreund, professor of English at Northeastern University, episodically traces the history and rhetoric of British natural theology from the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The unifying scheme is the identification of a few key “turning points,” when the…
Reviewed by Dennis L. Sansom, Philosophy, Samford University R. Scott Smith primarily argues that the supposed fact-value split (that is, between scientific truths and religious-ethical truths) is philosophically unfounded because it rests on the mistaken notion that we do not have direct cognitive access to reality. Consequently, the many ethical theories and approaches that presume…
For Robin Lane Fox, the timelessness of Augustine’s Confessions demands a reading that attends to the particular time and place that gave rise to this classic work. Accordingly, Lane Fox introduces Augustine: Conversions to Confessions as a “‘biography’ of the Confessions” (7), not as a biography of Augustine. Although such an approach cannot ignore Augustine’s…
Christian Scholar’s Review is pleased to announce the appointment of Margaret Diddams as Editor. As of Monday, August, 17, 2020, Diddams will oversee the print journal’s commitment to serving as a premier outlet for Christian scholarship. Diddams recently retired as Provost of Wheaton College, where she championed faith and learning scholarship. On her retirement,…
Here’s an open secret: professors do not go into teaching for the grading. Cliché, I know, but for most of us, grading is the necessary cost of doing what we love: leading lively discussions, preparing thought-provoking lectures, writing ground-breaking books or articles, and mentoring students. Grading, on the other hand, is just, well, grating—at least…
Author Q&A with George Yancey Christ Animating Learning blogger George Yancey is coming out with a new book in March by Intervarsity Press entitled, Beyond Racial Division: A Unifying Alternative to Colorblindness and Antiracism. We were able to ask George some questions about this new book. In your introduction you suggest there are two main…
In his book Specters of Marx, French philosopher Jacques Derrida observes that time is always “out of joint.” Citing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he notes that Hamlet’s tragedy arises from his mission to right a wrong that can never present itself, a crime that is always in the past. The disjunction of crime and correction is ever present in the…
Rodney Stark sums up the argument of God’s Battalions tersely: The thrust of the preceding chapters can be summarized very briefly. The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They…
Stratford Caldecott’s finely-written book, Beauty for Truth’s Sake, advocates a return to (Christian) Pythagoreanism as the founding spirit of liberal arts education. Caldecott understands true education as centered on the liberal arts, which he interprets in the spirit of their classical roots as trivium and quadrivium. He argues that education has been disenchanted, because it…
Robert B. Stewart is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he holds the Greer-Heard Chair of Faith and Culture. It is there that he also directs the annual Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum, which is a five-year pilot program that provides evangelical and non-evangelical scholars opportunities to come together to…
In responding to my Art+Faith: A Theology of Making, many have correctly, as Ms. Kresser has done, connected my “slow art” to the pre-industrial mode of creating handmade objects, and to interpret my book as a call to move against the industrial path of utilitarian pragmatism. The return to “handmade culture” of the pre-industrial time…
It’s not surprising that we are creatures of habit, a consistent finding across multiple subfields of psychology. We mostly go through our days with preferred rhythms of sleeping, eating, working, playing, and engaging with others. But habits and preferences shape more than daily big-ticket items. They also influence the nanosecond processes by which we perceive…
