Christians have been active in philosophy of mathematics in recent years, but Steven D. Boyer and Walter B. Huddell III argue that the classical work of Augustine of Hippo in this field has been largely misunderstood or distorted even by its supposed advocates. This essay corrects that distortion and shows how the traditional Augustinian awareness…
In this episode of the Saturdays at Seven Podcast, Todd Ream interviews George Marsden, the Francis M. McAnaney Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Todd and George discuss how the Christian Scholar’s Review began and how it has grown over the years. George also talks about his newly published book, An Infinite Fountain of Light: Jonathan Edwards for the 21st Century, as well as the updated version of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship that will be published soon.
In this episode of the Saturdays at Seven Podcast, Todd Ream interviews Sarah Schnitker, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University and Director of the Science of Virtues Lab. They discuss Sarah’s work studying patience and other virtues, as well as how religiosity and spirituality contribute to people’s virtue development. Sarah also shares about working with other researchers across different disciplines to meet the felt needs of various communities.
When I was a boy growing up in Hong Kong, both my parents were professors. They worked some long days during the long semesters and sometimes brought papers home to grade on the kitchen table after dinner. At the same time, they never seemed to be working deep into the night, and summers were a…
It is an understatement to say that confusion abounds over the words “evangelical” and “evangelicalism.” These terms have been used in wondrously different ways by scholars, researchers, church leaders, and journalists. Few would argue with historian George Marsden when he wrote of the “conceptual challenge in … [saying] what evangelicalism is” and when he concluded…
Every business is a social structure. Critical realist sociology tells us that social structures influence the decisions that persons within them make by presenting restrictions (penalties for violating norms) and opportunities (rewards for taking up advantages offered), that frequently alter those nonetheless free decisions. Thus, a business can encourage or discourage virtuous decisions, and over…
Do buildings push your buttons? How does it feel to walk down a city street and feel gleaming glass rising on either side? What about towers of stone, casting long, dark shadows? How does it feel to see spires of commerce (think New York’s Chrysler building) rising like space-age cathedrals against a vast, blue sky?…
The 20th-century fundamentalist questions, pre-dating Carl F. H. Henry and the later rise of the Moral Majority, of whether Christians should participate in the political sphere are long gone. The fact that “evangelical” is now often understood within and without the Church as a political rather than theological marker has led to no little handwringing…
Among business disciplines, David J. Hagenbuch notes that marketing may be the field that is perceived least often as compatible with Christian vocation. However, when one considers that the central purpose of Christian vocation is reconciliation, that reconciliation is linked inextricably to exchange, and that marketing is the science that facilitates mutually beneficial exchange, it…
How might Christians in the natural sciences articulate their aims and motivations? Finding bearings in the themes of faith and calling, Matthew Walhout argues that traditional answers to this question tend to bind Christian thinking too strongly to objectivist rationality. He reiterates a concern registered historically in the context of Renaissance humanism, namely that Christian…
Reticence is not much of western virtue. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the words of Edgar, son of the Earl of Gloucester, to “speak as we feel, not what we ought to say” illustrate the tragic cost of withholding one’s authentic thoughts and feelings toward others and perhaps even more tragically from oneself. After all, pulling…
In this episode of the Saturdays at Seven Podcast, Todd interviews Shirley Hoogstra, the president of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU), on her role in representing Christian higher education institutions, today’s challenges facing the Christian higher education, and the relationship between Christian education and the Church.
Almost forty years ago Alvin Plantinga’s memorable “Advice to Christian Philosophers” set out a three-fold challenge to encourage members of his own academic tribe, but also “Christian intellectuals generally.” First, “to display . . . more independence of the rest of the philosophical world”; second, to “display more integrity in the sense of integral wholeness”;…
Almost forty years ago Alvin Plantinga’s memorable “Advice to Christian Philosophers” set out a three-fold challenge to encourage members of his own academic tribe, but also “Christian intellectuals generally.” First, “to display . . . more independence of the rest of the philosophical world”; second, to “display more integrity in the sense of integral wholeness”;…
With today’s blog, I’m pleased to introduce the spring issue of Christian Scholar’s Review. We open the issue with a symposium addressing the issue of Christian political engagement. The twentieth-century fundamentalist questions, pre-dating Carl F. H. Henry and the later rise of the Moral Majority, of whether Christians should participate in the political sphere are…
In the first post in this series, I stated my intent to explore the logic of a Christian university offering a graduate program that equips library professionals to serve in Christian academic institutions. In my second post, I offered assessments of library science programs offered by six Christian institutions. In the process of making those…
In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, the character Lucien keeps a library of “every story that has ever been dreamed … novels their authors never wrote, or never finished, except in dreams.” One shelf, presumably that of British authors, holds The Return of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Alice’s Journey Behind the Moon by Lewis Carroll,…
In the 1980s the idea emerged that psychological problems are often caused by unremembered sexual abuse, and that healing requires retrieval of memory. While much of main-stream psychology later questioned the validity and/or reliability of such memories, many evangelical therapists and ministry leaders have continued to be “carriers” of recovered memory approaches. Using case study…
In the early centuries after Christ, myriad heresies peeled free of the doctrinal core, curling attractively, then blanching and withering. They were like eddies swirling off a current, spiraling prettily and then dissipating. Or like whorls of smoke from a pipe. Such things were attractive precisely in their divergence from the core. They were Life…
I made many mistakes in my oral qualifying exam, halfway through grad school. The first was probably that I wore a double-breasted blazer at least 5 years out of style, as a committee member noted at the beginning. More substantial was the fact that I stumbled over explaining my collaborator’s techniques to the committee, one…
