When challenged in Luke 10 by a cheeky expert in Mosaic law who asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus turns the question back on his interlocutor and inquires what the Jewish scriptures say. The scholar can easily rehearse the formula found in the Torah: love God, and love your neighbor as…
Todd C. Ream is Professor of Higher Education, Taylor University, and Distinguished Fellow, Excelsia College. By almost any measure, Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C. (May 25, 1917 –February 26, 2015) was among the greatest university presidents of the twentieth century. Some historians may even go so far as to argue Hesburgh stands amongst the greatest university…
Reviewed by James S. Spiegel, Philosophy and Religion, Taylor University A long-standing criticism of open theism—at least since the emergence of the movement in the 1990s—is its failure to adequately account for God’s permission of evil. Why would God refrain from stopping rapes, murders, and child abuse when he could easily do so? The standard…
Reviewed by David Brodnax, Sr., History, Trinity Christian College “The American founders read the Bible” (1). This first line in Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers aptly summarizes Daniel L. Dreisbach’s exploration of the Christian scriptures’ theological, literary, and rhetorical impact on the people who created American democracy. With this historical work, Dreisbach, a…
Reviewed by Lenore M. Knight Johnson, Sociology, Trinity Christian College Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, best known for her explorations into the intersections of work, family, and personal life, departs from her previous work and dives into the world of American political divisions in her most recent book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning…
Since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, critics have charged that the principle of sola Scriptura has brought about “anarchy” in the life of the church. Scholars across the theological spectrum have taken on the Reformation, noting what they see as the empirical reality of “pervasive interpretative pluralism” (Christian Smith) or “unintended consequences” (Brad Gregory)….
In Global Gospel: An Introduction to Christianity on Five Continents, Douglas Jacobsen provides a valuable overview of the global Christian Church. With the ongoing expansion of Christianity since the first century, it has become increasingly difficult to navigate the “immense diversity across contemporary Christianity” (xv). Jacobsen takes on this challenge, providing a well-researched and comprehensive…
In 1940, at a time when war led many to introspection, G. H. Hardy wrote A Mathematician’s Apology to reflect upon and to justify his work in mathematics. A classic for the field, the essay provided a glimpse into the mind and motivations of a mathematician. To Hardy, mathematics was a creative art using the…
Introduction The purpose of higher education has been argued for centuries, and is currently on the hot seat in public discourse for its high costs and debt in the midst of wage stagnation and reduced upward mobility. The response to this hot seat has been for increased attention to the role of higher education in…
A wide range of contemporary Christian scholarship claims that a history of Enlightenment ethical thought, social science and epistemology is the first step to exposing the inadequacies of modern accounts of the good life. Michael Kugler argues instead that their attempts at critical historical analysis and explanation are unconvincing. Their narrative arguments are built on…
David I. Smith is the Director of Graduate Studies in Education and the Director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning at Calvin College. Lamenting divisions between theory and practice, theology and education, and the academy and the church, the editors of a recent volume on the Christian university comment wryly in their…
It is by now cliché to point out that contemporary culture is saturated with mediated images. Since Marshall McLuhan, it has also become increasingly commonplace to assume that this diverse profusion of images has replaced nature as the primary environment in which we live, move, and have our being. Such an overwhelming omnipresence of media…
Jack Mulder Jr. is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Hope College. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes the following about controversies surrounding the Blessed Virgin Mary: …there is no controversy between Christians which needs to be so delicately touched as this. The Roman Catholic beliefs on that subject…
The 2005 publication of a comparison of the chimpanzee genome and the human genome revealed overwhelming evidence of common ancestry for human beings and other primates. For Christians trained in genetics and genomics, it also provided the most substantial challenge to date to the historicity of Adam. Until that time, many believers who study science…
The tradition and legacy of Dutch theologian, politician, and journalist (and more) Abraham Kuyper and his theologian colleague Herman Bavinck have been often regarded as the special or narrow object of interest of those associated with denominations and institutions with roots in the Netherlands. Craig G. Bartholomew has written Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition with…
In his Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament, the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, John Wesley, strove for biblical commentary that penetrated deeply yet remained concise and clear. Discontent with mere intellectual insights, Wesley yearned to assist the “learned and unlearned” to understand better God’s ways so that they would progress in joy and character development…
When neighborhoods gentrify, residents can be physically displaced as well as psychologically displaced. This psychological displacement can occur even if the resident is not physically displaced. In this article, Keith E. Starkenburg and Mackenzi Huyser explore the significant impact that neighborhood changes have on one’s attachment to place as expressed through the concept of Christian…
I first heard Dr. Ryken present the substance of this essay at a conference of Christian college and university presidents. Resonance filled the room. Heads nodded with empathy and affirmation. I have also had opportunities to see the ways in which Dr. Ryken integrates the roles of prophet, priest and king as he leads Wheaton…
This paper by Dennis L. Sansom examines and compares the ideas about the nature of the self in the twelfth-century theologian St. Peter of Damaskos and the twenty-first-century philosopher Richard Rorty. Peter understands the self as a flexible reality defined by a person’s ability to orient intentions, desires, and beliefs toward ever increasingly important ontological…
Robert Boyd is a professor at Fresno City College, where he has taught philosophy and theology of religions since 1996. While Boyd has maintained his primary interest in the field of critical reasoning, much of his current research deals with issues connected to the philosophy and theology of religions. He recently published two impressive volumes…
