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Not Quite Exiles nor Never Much of an Eden: The Meaning of Vocation for the Professorate Thirty Years after the Publication of Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden

November 6, 2024
The early 1990s saw a rash of books on religion and higher education, and Mark Schwehn’s 1993 Exiles From Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America was a book unlike any of the rest. It begins with two memorable illustrations of the central problem Schwehn addresses. The first recalls a faculty get-­together at the…

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Ontological Bruising. Ouch! What am I for?

“He was only nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina As a mom and a Christian college…

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Saturdays at Seven Conversation Series

“Sequencing Success” ft. the Institute for Family Studies’ Wendy Wang I Saturdays at Seven – Season Two, Episode Twenty

In the twentieth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Wendy Wang, the Director of Research for the Institute for Family Studies. Wang opens by discussing the research she and her colleagues conduct concerning the Success Sequence—a set of three steps that when followed in order…
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November 6, 2024

Telling New Stories

Last year a group of provosts convened to engage in conversations about Emerson’s essay, “The American Scholar.” Over the period of a year, we looked for insights into the role of the Christian scholar by reflecting on Emerson’s description of the ideal American scholar. He admonished the American scholar to break free from the European…
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November 6, 2024

The Christian Scholar as a Poet

A Tale of Two Emersons In the little New England town where I grew up, two roads were named after Ralph Waldo Emerson—different roads sharing one name. Our split-­level home sat on a half-­acre plot by a meadow; while I lived on this quiet Emerson Road, there was another Emerson Road less than a mile…
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November 6, 2024

Christian Higher Education: Partnering the Chapel and Laboratory

In 2011 Pepperdine University hosted a conference in which Francis S. Collins offered the keynote address. His credentials are extraordinary: Collins is an accomplished research scientist, physician, director of the Human Genome Project, and subsequently director of the National Institutes of Health for three consecutive United States presidents. A devout Christian believer, he authored The…
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November 6, 2024

The Wholehearted, Daring, Balancing Act of Christian Scholarship

The American Scholar On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped into the pulpit of First Parish Meetinghouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to deliver what would become one of the defining lectures of his life and legacy, “The American Scholar.” Harvard University, having celebrated its bicentennial anniversary not even a year before, was a bastion of…
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August 26, 2024

Eat Lovingly: Christian Ethics for Sustainable and Just Food Systems

What we choose to eat impacts not only our health, but also contributes positively or negatively towards sustainability and justice. How food is produced determines its impact on environmental sustainability  through pollution, soil erosion, ground water depletion, and biodiversity conservation. A food systems lens looks beyond production to consider the complex social issues linking food…
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August 26, 2024

Reorienting Strategy to Shalom

The contemporary concept of strategy is problematic when viewed from ethical and theological perspectives. This concept arose historically from the political-military context of conflicting interests and maneuvers to gain power. When transferred to the realm of business, the concept retained the assumption of conflicting interests expressed in moves and countermoves attempting to achieve advantages over…

Latest from The Christ Animated Learning Blog

The CSR blog is published daily with contributions from over 30 experienced scholars and practitioners discuss how Christ animates learning across a broad range of fields. The CSR blog provides a forum that both creates and curates interdisciplinary conversations about faith and learning in a way that draws and informs leading Christian scholars and practitioners from around the world.

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February 5, 2025

Ontological Bruising. Ouch! What am I for?

“He was only nine years old, he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was dear to him, he protected it as the eyelid protects the eye, and did not let anyone into his soul without the key of love.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina As a mom and a Christian college…
Blog
February 4, 2025

On Konglish and Caring for Students

In my family, like many Korean American families, we regularly communicate using Konglish (Korean + English). We rely on Konglish when something complicated or multilayered can be better expressed using a combination of Korean and English words. The other day, during an evening walk with my spouse, I said the following about two students who…
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January 30, 2025

Does the United States Need a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? For Good Stewardship, Yes!

Now that Donald Trump has become president, one of his signature initiatives is a proposal to form a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). According to Trump, DOGE will “pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/11/trump-vows-dismantle-federal-bureaucracy-and-restructure-agencies-new-musk-led-commission/400998/. This new entity will be led by…
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January 29, 2025

Amos Alonzo Stagg and the Transformation of Muscular Christianity

This essay is adapted from The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports (Oxford University Press). In its American form, muscular Christianity sought to counter the supposed feminization of the Protestant church by presenting a more masculine image fit for a “strenuous” age of American expansion. Athletics became an important part of the…
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January 28, 2025

The Surprising Ways College Students Think about Money: And How Christian Institutions Do Little to Help Their Thinking

"Tryna make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die”Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Verve I remember seeing an empirical finding as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s and often thereafter. The finding came from the First Year Survey given annually by the Higher Education Research Institution at UCLA. They gave first-year students…
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January 27, 2025

An Ancient Tool for Change in a New University World

It is a season of change in the American higher education world. The technological tsunami of online education has broken across the university beachfront and the economic efficiency for students being able to earn a degree without leaving home, and often at reduced tuition, has produced a massive increase in online programs. At the same…

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Established in 1970, Christian Scholar’s Review is a medium for communication among Christians who have been called to an academic vocation. Its primary objective is the publication of peer-reviewed scholarship and research, within and across the disciplines, that advances the integration of faith and learning and contributes to a broader and more unified understanding of the nature of creation, culture, and vocation and the responsibilities of those whom God has created. It also provides a forum for discussion of pedagogical and theoretical issues related to Christian higher education. It invites contributions from Christian scholars of all historic traditions, and from others sympathetic to the task of religiously-informed scholarship, that advance the work of Christian academic communities and enhance mutual understanding with other religious and academic communities.

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