In the late 1940s, budding American evangelist Bob Pierce visited Amoy, China, to preach the gospel at a girl’s school run by Dutch Reformed missionary Tena Hoelkeboer. Not knowing much about Chinese culture, Pierce told students to go home and tell their parents that they were going to become Christians. One of them actually did…
The love command is meant to encompass all areas of life for Christians, including Christian public engagement. Given cultural understandings of love, defining love carefully becomes a pressing task. Gorman’s cruciform definition of love helps by defining love negatively, as not seeking our own advantage or edification, and positively, as seeking the good, the advantage,…
Management research in the disciplines of Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management and Industrial / Organizational Psychology focuses on creating the optimum equ-librium between people and their work contexts. In this essay, Margaret Diddams and Denise Daniels use the Christian themes of creation, fall and redemption as a framework to analyze current management theories, and to…
Building on Miroslav Volf’s treatise Work in the Spirit, Donald W. Griesinger explores the theology of work as it pertains to the creative activities of Christian scholars, providing a theological grounding for those seeking greater integration in their lives by partnering with Christ in their scholarly work through prayer. Whether directed toward the church, the…
Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón: Hollywood’s “three amigos” have enjoyed recent financial and critical success and raised the profile of Mexican film-making in the process. In this paper, Scott DeVries finds that the cinematic aesthetics in films from these highly-regarded filmmakers represent the culmination of a long history of Mexican filmmaking, one…
As a young lad, Gerbert Aurillac entered the monastery, receiving a Church education. He served as a schoolmaster teaching future bishops, became a tutor and counselor to kings and emperors, advanced to abbot, then to archbishop, and eventually was elected Pope Sylvester II in 999 A.D. With a resume like that in the tenth century,…
Some colleagues and I recently undertook a national study of Christian faculty development programs at Christian colleges and universities. Although I will share a link to the academic publication containing the results when published, I want to share one of our conclusions. We realized in the end that Christian institutions need some fresh ideas in…
Amos Yong is J. Rodman Williams Professor of Theology at Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Evangelical higher education appears to be a booming business in the twenty-first century. Enrollment and expansion have persisted at much higher rates over the last two decades for schools affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges…
Amos Yong is J. Rodman Williams Professor of Theology at Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Evangelical higher education appears to be a booming business in the twenty-first century. Enrollment and expansion have persisted at much higher rates over the last two decades for schools affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges…
In this essay Daniel R. Allen reviews nuclear deterrence, the most crucial theoretic construct for nuclear weapons policy. A wide range of positions exists with respect to belief in the deterrent utility of nuclear weapons. The positions of deterrence optimists rely entirely on a presumption that human rationality undercuts the motive for nuclear weapon use….
Despite historical and recent scholarship that demonstrates the need to appeal to the affective dimension of students to enable appropriate behavior, Christian business education is dominated by cognitively focused “worldview integration.” In this essay Kenman Wong, Bruce Baker, and Randal Franz argue for reimagining business education as a formational enterprise in order to facilitate a…
Secular norms of managerial rationality disregard God’s involvement in organizations. If we acknowledge that God is present and active in social organizing, how do our understandings and practices of entrepreneurship and management change? Such a perspective reconceives organizing as collaborating with the Spirit of God. This article describes the Spirit’s role in organizing social systems…
David A. Hoekema is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College. George Marsden was a professor of History at Calvin College (1965–1986), Duke Divinity School (1986–1992), and The University of Notre Dame (1992–2008). His publications include The Soul of the American University (1994) and Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003), winner of the Bancroft Prize. Richard Mouw…
In the second episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Francis S. Collins, physician-scientist and former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Collins begins by describing the day in November 2020, when he and his colleagues at the NIH unblinded the data related to the clinical trial for the COVID-19 vaccine and found its efficacy rate was 94.5%. In addition to describing his response and the responses of his colleagues to what was an unprecedented success, Collins offers details concerning previous scientific achievements upon which he and his colleagues depended when making such a successful vaccine in such a short period of time. Ream then asks Collins to step back and describe how he came to embrace serving as a physician-scientist as his vocation. While Collins was fortunate to work with several mentors while a medical student, a doctoral student, and an undergraduate, he offers the greatest credit to a high school teacher, Mr. House, who introduced Collins to scientific research as being comparable to being a detective. Collins describes his hopes for his most recent book, The Road to Wisdom, and his desire for people to come together during such a polarized season. Collins then closes by describing his work with operatic-soprano Renée Fleming and how the relationship shared by music and science enhances human health and flourishing.
Virtue ethics has made impressive inroads into the business academy. However, the prospects of the development of virtues in the actual practice of business remain in doubt. Among the most influential skeptics is Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues that business institutions must focus on “external goods” (material rewards and prestige) which threaten the development of “internal…
The vocational fragmentation we noted in yesterday’s post summarizing some prominent Oppenheimer biographies likely had deeper roots going back to Oppenheimer’s childhood. David C. Cassidy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century offers important details concerning the impact of Oppenheimer’s upbringing on his sense of vocation. Cassidy contends that Oppenheimer’s parents considered it to be…
To read Philippa Koch’s The Course of God’s Providence in 2021 is to realize that the gap between the world of the eighteenth century and that of the twenty-first century is much smaller in some ways than a reader might have believed had the book been published only two years previously. Prior to the COVID-19…
To read Philippa Koch’s The Course of God’s Providence in 2021 is to realize that the gap between the world of the eighteenth century and that of the twenty-first century is much smaller in some ways than a reader might have believed had the book been published only two years previously. Prior to the COVID-19…
In the past few years, the symphony of women’s voices and the stories emanating from their own, often tragic, experiences in both the sacred and secular world have only grown louder, demanding that the church and society pay attention to women’s grievances and to their cries for equality and justice. By noting both the contributions…
In the past few years, the symphony of women’s voices and the stories emanating from their own, often tragic, experiences in both the sacred and secular world have only grown louder, demanding that the church and society pay attention to women’s grievances and to their cries for equality and justice. By noting both the contributions…
