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…
Dennis Sansom presents and examines the way the experience of death teaches a moral lesson from three poets and playwrights. Sophocles’ conclusion to Oedipus Rex shows the shortcoming of living a meaningful life based upon a utilitarian calculus. Shakespeare’s soliloquy of “To be or not to be” given by Hamlet exposes the limitations of trying…
Rob Warner, sociologist and head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at University of Wales, Lampeter, produces an intriguing analysis of the evolution of English pan-Evangelicalism during the latter half of the 20th century in his recent work Reinventing English Evangelicalism. Following Callum Brown’s advocacy of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of…
Denis Lamoureux’s goal in this book is to demonstrate that Christians in general and conservative Christians in particular should have no hesitation in accepting evolution as a potentially complete scientific account of the origin and development of biological life. Lamoureux’s view would be described usually as “theistic evolution” but Lamoureux objects to this description of…
Having been struck by the title of the former book, I was reading it with a view to reviewing it when I came across the latter, and decided after a preliminary perusal that a review of both together would be more fruitful. As a teacher of the Classics (mostly in translation) at a Christian College,…
In this paper, Jacques Ellul’s theory of “technique” and his theology of the city are framed into a critique of New Urbanism. Against Modernism’s view of the city as a “machine for living in,” New Urbanism harks back to the ambiance of old New England towns. But far from assuring the sense of community it…
Sometime in 2008, most demographers would agree, we crossed a historic threshold, one that is meaningful to Christian scholarship. Until then, and since the earliest days of civilization, the bulk of the world’s population lived in rural areas. Even at the turn of the 20th century, only 10% of the world’s population lived in cities….
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…
My interest in relating Christian faith to the practice of librarianship emerged about 25 years ago when I was pursuing my master’s degree in library science. I first explored such integration in a class paper that I entitled “The Role of Christian Academic Libraries: Promoting the Theistic Worldview.” My professor returned my paper with various…
In the wake of the collapse of Enron, together with the more recent financial crises stemming from the prevalence of pragmatic ethics, an approach whose moral bankruptcy has caused financial bankruptcies, there is a growing desire to return to finding some basis for moral absolutes. In her 1958 article “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Elizabeth Anscombe, while…
When the Professional Becomes Personal: Opportunities and Challenges for Faculty of Color Teaching DEI Courses Overview of the Blog Series Although they are underrepresented in Christian higher education, faculty of color are overrepresented among those teaching the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) courses – at times, the single DEI course – within their department. For…
