Back in 2001, I got a dog for my fortieth birthday. Balancing my professorship, a husband who traveled too much for his job, and a home with four children attending four different schools, I wanted a creature in my life who asked for little more than food, water, a good brush down, and a walk….
Almost forty years ago Alvin Plantinga’s memorable “Advice to Christian Philosophers” set out a three-fold challenge to encourage members of his own academic tribe, but also “Christian intellectuals generally.” First, “to display . . . more independence of the rest of the philosophical world”; second, to “display more integrity in the sense of integral wholeness”;…
I teach literature today in no small part thanks to Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane’s realistic novella depicting the impoverished conditions of life in the Bowery at the turn of the twentieth century. When I first encountered the story, I was immediately captivated by Crane’s ability to use mere words to bring…
In the era of declining enrollments, Christian colleges and universities face two perennial questions: what are the defining features of Christian education, and why are they worth a higher tuition rate than the state school down the road? Christian colleges offer many distinctive features, including chapel, single-sex residence halls, and required courses on theology or…
Perry Glanzer’s Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education is a sequel to his earlier 2022 book, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity. Dismantling offered an extended account, largely historical but occasionally theoretical, of how American academia, especially during the period from 1860–2020, steadily diminished human…
In the short space of about 30 years, we have gone from heralding liberal democracy (or liberalism) as the final political regime (see Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis) to wondering whether it can or should survive. The big idea behind liberalism is liberty. Now, liberty is variously defined and can mean something like “freedom from”…
For many faculty with school-age children at home, it is a common dilemma that inevitably comes around a couple of times a year: our children’s school vacation dates (e.g., spring break) rarely align with ours. In the grand scheme of things that truly trouble our world, this is not a big source of angst; but…
Editorial note: This reflection from Nicholas Wolterstorff is part of a curated discussion on “Christian Perspectives in Higher Learning.” See David Hoekema’s introduction to that discussion here. Our topic is the remarkable renaissance of Christian thought that has taken place over the past 50 years or so and the role of Calvin College in that…
Perry Glanzer’s Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education is a sequel to his earlier 2022 book, The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity. Dismantling offered an extended account, largely historical but occasionally theoretical, of how American academia, especially during the period from 1860–2020, steadily diminished human…
Scholars at Christian institutions have inherited from the broader academy an archival definition of knowledge that tends to obscure relationships between academic scholarship and broader human enterprises. This essay builds upon and extends the work of Ernest Boyer and others who have advocated for a stronger link between scholarship and human communities. It argues that…
If I could tell my college-aged self to read just one book, it would be The Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph B. Soloveitchik. I’ve read it three times since I discovered it in 2012, and I wish I’d found it earlier. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I wouldn’t have…
Almost forty years ago Alvin Plantinga’s memorable “Advice to Christian Philosophers” set out a three-fold challenge to encourage members of his own academic tribe, but also “Christian intellectuals generally.” First, “to display . . . more independence of the rest of the philosophical world”; second, to “display more integrity in the sense of integral wholeness”;…
“I think that you appreciate that there are extraordinary men and women and extraordinary moments when history leaps forward on the backs of these individuals, that what can be imagined can be achieved, that you must dare to dream, but that there’s no substitute for perseverance and hard work …” – FBI Special Agent Dana…
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Paul Henry Lecture offers a succinct overview of neo-Calvinist political thought. That body of thought is rooted in the work of the late 19th- and early 20th-century thinker and politician Abraham Kuyper. It is therefore roughly coeval with the body of social teaching promulgated by the magisterium of the Catholic Church and is,…
Things that grow big start small. The January Series at Calvin College fits the pattern. More than 30 years ago it began as a lunch-break lecture series for first-year students enrolled in a three-week exploration of “Christian Perspectives on Learning,” with a mix of local faculty and guest speakers. As its founder June Hamersma was…
After hearing repeatedly about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that OpenAI made available a few months ago, I finally decided to give the system a test drive in mid-February. I chose to engage ChatGPT in an exchange about the relationship between Christians and libraries—a subject area on which I have written and presented repeatedly, especially…
Over the past 52 years, Christian Scholar’s Review has published over 1,000 articles and is well on its way to reviewing 4,000 books. Published quarterly, each issue usually showcases 4–5 articles and 8–10 book reviews from the full range of academic fields. In our continual mission to further Christ-animated scholarship, we invite you to add…
You’re Only Human by Kelly M. Kapic, Professor of theological studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, is a book recently published by Brazos Press (and which recently won a Christianity Today Book of the Year award). The point of the book is clearly stated in the subtitle: “How your limits reflect God’s design…
“Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” opens John S. Feinberg in Four Views on Heaven (23). Trying to circumvent, downplay, or ignore our mortality, as well as demurring to talk candidly about death, has bedeviled humanity from time immemorial, satirized by the likes of Monty Python’s classic “Parrot Sketch” and…
I will limit my response to the heart of our exchange, which has focused on how a Christian teacher’s personal convictions can be shared in a secular and pluralistic university classroom. Of special significance here is the fact that while G&A and I agree on their practical rules of transparency, we continue to disagree about…
