Though this is a special theme issue of Christian Scholar’s Review, partly under the editorship of a guest editor, the reviews section is not part of the special issue. This does not mean, of course, that the reviews are not special—indeed, we are blessed with a multitude of insightful contributions. It simply means that they are not themed in the same way as the articles. In my mind, the appropriate approach for a reviews section in a broad, interdisciplinary journal like Christian Scholar’s Review will almost always be eclectic and varied, with each issue only able to provide a sampling of the diverse, important works being published all the time by Christian scholars across all the disciplines and in countless interdisciplinary areas. Each issue’s sampling will hopefully whet the appetite of our readers to dive into these sorts of books due to the way they can nurture and nourish the life of Christian teaching, scholarship, and institutional citizenship.
In this issue, we have several types of reviews: one review essay, two extended review-and-author-response exchanges, and two standard reviews.
The review essay, “Fidelity and Fearless Engagement: Charting the Future of Christian Colleges, A Review of Three Perspectives,” is written by Melinda Stephens, provost of Geneva College. In her essay, Stephens takes up three books dealing with leadership and mission in Christian higher education: Richard Langer and Scott Rae’s Mission-Driven Colleges (B&H Academic, 2025), John Hawthorne’s The Fearless Christian College (Eerdmans, 2025), and Rick Ostrander’s Academically Speaking: Lessons from a Life in Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2024). Stephens’s essay analyzes the paths traveled by these books and insightfully teases out some of the key convergences and tensions between them, which all deal with ways for Christian institutions of higher learning to navigate the relationship between fidelity to Christian mission and theological identity, on the one hand, and brave engagement with the complexities of a confusing and changing world, on the other. Stephens contends “that the future for Christian higher education lies not in choosing between fidelity and fearlessness, but in courageously embodying both, recognizing that true faithfulness to mission often necessitates the greatest courage in engagement.” This essay (and the books it examines) will be helpful for all administrators thinking about how to lead their schools, as well as faculty members thinking about how their work of teaching and scholarship feeds (and is fed by) the institutions to which they have committed themselves.
We have the privilege of featuring two extended reviews on books hot off their respective presses, with responses written by the authors. In time-honored Christian Scholar’s Review style, the reviewer is invited to have the final word. The first book is Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen’s Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage (Oxford University Press, 2025). More than twenty years ago, the Jacobsens’ volume, Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation,1 drew upon a broad array of theological traditions and metaphors—especially going beyond the language of “integration”—to map the landscape of Christian scholarship. Subsequently, they edited The American University in a Postsecular Age and wrote No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education,2 both of which offer rather hopeful cases for faithful Christian presence in mainstream academic life. Their new book takes up the contested matter of identity to explore how faith relates to academic life for individual scholars, in the process offering four “pathways” of intellectual pilgrimage (attentiveness, contemplation, proclamation, and compassion) for Christians engaged in academic work.
The reviewer, Joseph Clair, associate provost for honors and humanities at George Fox University, expresses his appreciation for the book’s “vast scope” and its resistance to “the enclosed ghettos of polarizing and identity-constrained thinking.” At the same time, Clair contends that the book insufficiently appreciates the contributions that could be made by figures such as Augustine to a “pilgrimage” model of intellectual life. The book, in his view, has an underdeveloped account of the telos of intellectual inquiry. In their response, Jacobsen and Jacobsen defend their book’s portrayal not only of Augustine but of the options available to Christians in academia, insisting that the book “conveys a message that should energize Christian scholars to participate in the broader academy with vigor and confidence. That confidence is not derived from a false sense of certitude but from believing that this is God’s world and that, by God’s grace, humans have the capacity to study and faithfully respond to both the grandeur and the present degradations of God’s creation.” In his response to the Jacobsens’s response, Clair explains how his rather pessimistic assessment of the “fragmentation and erosion” of modern higher education leads him to believe that Christians in higher education need, more than ever, specifically “Jesus-centered accounts” of the purpose and character of intellectual inquiry.
The second review-and-response exchange focuses on Graham Tomlin’s new thematic biography, Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025). Something of a hybrid between a traditional chronological biography and a thematic account of Pascal’s thought, this book explains the myriad contributions Pascal made in the course of a sadly short life to science, technology, philosophy, and theology, contributions that have a subtle and underappreciated ongoing effect in our lives today. Douglas Groothuis, distinguished university research professor of apologetics and Christian worldview at Cornerstone University, himself the author of a recent book on Pascal’s famous “wager,”3 writes a grateful review of Tomlin’s book, while still wishing that Tomlin had given greater attention to the possibilities of natural theology in relation to Pascal’s thought. Tomlin explains, with reasons related to his own area of academic expertise (historical theology, in distinction from Groothuis’s inclinations as a philosopher), as well as reasons related to Pascal’s own thinking, why he regarded that as inadvisable. Pascal’s distinction between inferential reason and the “instinctive intuition” of the heart made him less than optimistic that arguments from natural theology would convince the unbeliever. In his response to Tomlin’s response, Groothuis confesses to “relishing” the thought of what a mind like Pascal’s would do with “new data from biology and physics indicating a Creator and Designer.”
With a lengthy review essay and two rather substantial review exchanges, relatively little space remained in this issue for shorter, “standard” reviews. Jenell Paris from Messiah University reviews the new book by Beth Allison Barr, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry (Brazos Press, 2025). And T. M. Moore of the Fellowship of Ailbe, reviews the book by Abram Van Engen, Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church (Eerdmans, 2024).
Footnotes
- Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation (Oxford University Press, 2004).
- Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, eds., The American University in a Postsecular Age (Oxford University Press, 2008); Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education (Oxford University Press, 2012).
- Douglas Groothuis, Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (InterVarsity, 2024).
