One increasingly popular interpretation of the scientific study of man is that, just as physical scientists have discovered the principles and causes of matter that have enabled engineers to create faster, more efficient machines, sociobiological scientists will someday discover the basic principles and causes of human thought and action to enable engineers to create better,…
I am grateful to Stewart Goetz for his thoughtful engagement of my short article (“The Pursuit of Happiness: C. S. Lewis’ Eudaimonistic Understanding of Ethics,” hereafter, “Pursuit”) within this wide-ranging and insightful account of C. S. Lewis’ ethics. I also thank the editors of this journal for the opportunity to respond, in order, hopefully, to…
When I was growing up in the 1950s in a small town in southwest Missouri, I knew the end was near. That thrilling sense of imminent doom partly stemmed from my parents’ ardent premillennialism; we expected the Rapture any moment. But it also stemmed from the daily newspaper. And with good reason. The communists—commies, we…
When I was growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, I knew the end was near. “The thrilling sense of imminent doom”…the fear of communists…the expectation of“Rapture [at] any moment” informed my life, just as it did Grant Wacker’s, though, perhaps, with less referencing of McCarthy and Eisenhower and more of Brezhnev, Khomeini, and the Red Army…
In this essay Gillis J. Harp notes that some American Evangelicals find it difficult to conceive of a species of conservatism that preserves a moral political economy and some notion of a paternalistic state protecting the less fortunate. Yet this is the kind of conservatism that characterized the thinking of one key strand within the…
During the last volume year the total number of submissions was eighty-one—slightly above normal—and I remain pleased with the quality of manuscripts we are receiving. Our acceptance-to-publication timeframe is approximately twelve months. The greater part of my free time over the last year has been working with my co-editors—Perry Glanzer, David Hoekema, Jerry Pattengale, Todd…
New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham has been working toward a full treatment of Bible and ecology for some years, with articles appearing in a variety of peer-reviewed publications in the areas of biblical studies and theology. It is therefore noteworthy that he has chosen to make that fuller argument for the first time in a…
What makes for good leadership? There isn’t a straightforward answer. The study and practice of leadership is a bit like Baskin-Robbins with thirty-one or more different flavors. There is valid data to show that effective leaders lead from the front with charismatic personalities. Other, equally valid, studies show that effective leaders function more in the…
This essay follows my earlier contribution in Part I, in which I argued that Christian embodiment is too often one of hierarchical dualism, alienation, and social separation. As those called to live in the reality of God’s redemptive work, we should seek out for ourselves, and inculcate in students, an embodiment of whole-ness, emotional and…
The August 9, 2021 edition of Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) featured a story in the field of structural biology entitled “How Transcription Gets Its Start.” Transcription is the biochemical process that occurs in every cell in the human body when protein synthesis is initiated. It is a complex series of steps that begin in…
With the release of this first issue of our fifty-first volume, we celebrate fifty years of God’s faithfulness to Christian Scholar’s Review. As with any anniversary we look to our past, consider the current status of Christian scholarship, and look forward with thanksgiving and some trepidation to the next fifty years. Looking to the past,…
Time will tell whether the trust we inherited is one we stewarded well in the name of Christian scholarship. For now, we will pause, celebrate 50 years of efforts made by countless individuals, and then prayerfully develop a strategic plan designed to guide CSR for years to come.
Susan M. Felch is Emerita Professor of English at Calvin University and the former director of the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship. She was the Executive Editor of the Calvin Shorts series and is the author or editor of numerous books including The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Teaching and…
With this issue we celebrate fifty years of God’s faithfulness to Christian Scholar’s Review. As with any anniversary we look to our past, consider the current status of Christian scholarship, and look forward with thanksgiving and some trepidation to the next fifty years. We have also given ourselves a bit of a gift, sprucing up…
Over the decades, Christian environmental exploration and activism have focused on some issues far more than others. Interest in international missions, the continuation of farming as an honored profession in many Christian communities, and the availability of clear Biblical guidance have driven a solid and thoughtful presence in the realms of food production and sustainable…
This essay was published in 2012 in the book Practically Human: College Professors Speak from the Heart of Humanities Education edited by Gary Schmidt & Matthew Walhout (Grand Rapids: Calvin College Press, 2012, 133-145). It asks why we invest time and resources in learning other languages and seeks to look further than pragmatic motivations based…
Work is inescapable; individuals are either working or using the fruits of their (or another’s) labor. Christian theology has been surprisingly quiet concerning this pervasive subject of work. Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor is Ben Witherington’s contribution to the topic. Witherington, Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, begins…
Simon LeVay’s book is the latest and most effective among the growing corpus of books and articles arguing for an exclusively biological explanation of sexual orientation. The broad and methodologically uneven array of evidence pointing to biological contributions to the origin of sexual orientation, heterosexual and homosexual, continues to amass, sprawling across diverse disciplinary areas…
This last week, I spent 45 minutes during a lunch trying to grasp for basic words. I did not know what was wrong with me. I could not ask a simple question of the person at the table, “What was your major in college?” Soon, I could not remember my lunch partners’ names. Fortunately, my…
It is cliche at this point to observe that humanistic learning is declining in American colleges and universities, including Christian ones. There are new data points each year, but the conclusion is always the same: faculty positions supporting particular arts and sciences majors, such as classics, history, philosophy, etc., are being reduced. It is easy…
