“…they want to hang on to different parts of religion that they find to be beneficial to their lives—but strictly on their terms.” – Description of Emerging Adults When I met the older widow, I would be interviewing, I would not describe her externally as rugged. She was small and thin in stature and would…
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. This famous poem by Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner William Yeats captures the anxieties he felt as he scanned the social horizon of his day. The forces…
(Book Review: Sherwood Lingenfelter, Teamwork Cross-Culturally: Christ-Centered Solutions for Leading Multinational Teams. Baker Academic, 2022). In a world where just a word (not to mention phrases, topics, or modes of interaction) may cause offense or even trauma, perhaps the safer course may be to keep to ourselves and at least do no harm. The very…
{The following excerpt comes from Matt Hoven, J.J. Carney, and Max Engel, On the Eighth Day: A Catholic Theology of Sport (Cascade/Wipf & Stock: Eugene, OR, 2022), 115-7. Used with permission from Wipf and Stock Publishers. Available for purchase at wipfandstock.com, Amazon.com, and elsewhere}. The vast majority of elite athletes practice superstitions—despite the fact that…
Like many of us, Victor Reppert, Professor of Philosophy at Glendale Community College in Arizona, has long been intrigued by the thought of C. S. Lewis, especially his so-called argument from reason (developed by Lewis most fully in chapter three of his book Miracles: A Preliminary Study). C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, an obvious allusion…
Peter Leithart’s Deep Comedy is an excellent example of interdisciplinary skill at work, calling upon history, theology, philosophy, and literature to paint a panoramic picture depicting a distinctly Christian worldview of history. This worldview stands in sharp contrast to other non-Christian worldviews, both ancient and (post)modern, that ultimately cave into tragic conclusions. Following the advent…
Introduction In a recent article in SEEN, the journal of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA), Beverly Roberts Gaventa poses the question, why bother with Mary? With this simple question, Gaventa identifies the attitude harbored by many Protestant Christians today. For some, however, this casual disregard moves to the level of uneasy suspicion and apprehension…
How, indeed, do we create into “our own Ground Zero realities?” In his thoughtful response to my review of Art + Faith, Makoto Fujimura stresses the importance of looking forward, not backward. This is a point well taken, and worth emphasizing. It is tempting to romanticize the past! And because there are so many past…
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…
In July 2021, Tim Muehlhoff and Rick Langer had a lengthy conversation with Theon Hill, a communications scholar whose research delves into the interface between the Black community and white evangelicalism, writing on the relationship between rhetoric and social change—particularly as related to race, culture, and American politics. He has written on the topic of…
Rick Langer is the Director of the Office of Faith and Learning at Biola University where he is also Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology and the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project. His publications have focused on applying theology to a wide variety of disciplines including business leadership, disability, suffering, bioethics, and most recently,…
Perhaps nowhere is the variety of American evangelicalism more apparent than among the 150 or so faith-based institutions that belong to the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU). While these institutions have learned to cooperate in areas such as faculty research, campus technology, and library services, in their core function—teaching and learning—Christian colleges and…
In September of 1930, the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer arrived in New York for his first visit to America. As a teaching fellow at Union Theological Seminary, the young Bonhoeffer spent the next year meeting colleagues like Jean Laserre, a French pacifist, and Frank Fisher, a black seminarian who introduced Bonhoeffer to Abyssinian…
Two key assumptions of political liberalism, individual rights and limited government, proceed logically from Christian premises. No political philosopher demonstrated this better than Glenn Tinder in The Political Meaning of Christianity. Each person is an “exalted individual,” one whose destiny is at the heart of the drama of creation and redemption. Respect for that status…
J. M. W. Turner, the renowned British landscape painter of the late 18th and early 19th century, renders the powerful forces of nature in dramatic fashion, evoking an array of moods from contentment to trepidation. In a similar way, Roger Olson paints a dramatic scene from the contemporary evangelical theological landscape by attempting to articulate…
The 2016 election of Donald Trump with 80% of the white evangelical vote has generated intense consternation about the identity of “evangelicalism”: the character of its constituents, its fragmentation according to political leanings, whether the term remains usable as a theological descriptor, given its partisan connotations. A related discussion has arisen concerning the history of…
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…
In this article, Amy S. Patterson investigates how political power shapes the AIDS pandemic in Africa. Because Christians in the West often lack knowledge about how political power increases vulnerability to HIV infection and affects policy responses to the disease, the work analyzes the uneven impact of HIV/AIDS on countries, communities, and population groups. It…
Racial tension, homosexuality and abortion are just a few of the topics where communication can quickly devolve into harmful conflict instead of calm and/or respectful dialogue. In this essay Julie W. Morgan and Richard K. Olsen explore the role of dialogue within a Christian academic community. How does a Christian academic community address subjects that…
