Popular sentiment may cast the American family as portrayed in the 1950s and early 1960s as a Platonic ideal. Children were precocious yet respectful of authority—enter Wally and Beaver Cleaver. Wives were the matriarchs of homes which were always in good order—enter June Cleaver. Husbands were dutiful providers who arrived home shortly after 5:00 p.m….
As academics, we all want listeners or readers who are interested in what interests us. They make our days. Like Luke who wrote both the gospel that bears his name and the Book of Acts for Theophilus, we have an interested audience in mind. Claar and Klay want to reach Christians who have no knowledge…
Business defines itself increasingly as the pursuit of money, but this move into the “iron cage” signals a process of abstraction away from goods internal to business. Scott Waalkes argues that virtues implicit in the Incarnation counter problems in this move by encouraging virtuous Christian business people to work toward the Kingdom of God through…
Max Weber lamented over a century ago that the context in which industrial age economic organizations operate emphasizes a technical and cultural rationalization focusing on the material at the expense of the super-material. The pursuit of material rewards in the modern economy has left little room for a spiritual or theological approach to understanding work…
An Alternative to Realism Scientific realism is the view that the aim of science is to produce literally true theories about the world. Although realism is probably the commonest philosophy among scientists, and perhaps even dominates among philosophers of science, alternative views abound, even after a century of serious inquiry about realism in science. I…
In my previous post, I offered the following line of reasoning: (1) The field of librarianship is inherently value-laden and thus subject to examination from a biblical worldview. (2) Few Christian institutions offer a graduate program in library science. (3) Libraries that serve Christian institutions offer the most natural venue for integrating faith and librarianship….
Randal Rauser argues that Focus on the Family’s popular lay-worldview curriculum entitled The Truth Project™fails to provide a true Christian worldview education, and instead evinces the marks of indoctrination. He begins with the core problem that that the curriculum encourages simplistic binary categories which distort the issues and inhibit the student from developing skills of…
This article was written prior to the financial global downturn of late 2008 and early 2009. Why do poverty, inequality, stagnation, oppression, conflict and environmental calamity plague some nations while other nations do so much better? Economist Roland Hoksbergen, geographer Janel Curry and political scientist Tracy Kuperus review and assess some of the main contemporary…
Wisdom in the Scriptures speaks explicitly about God’s day-to-day involvement in the governance of His creation. Harry Cook and John R. Wood explore how participants in the religion-science debate have developed theories about the seeming independence of nature and its laws and God’s relationship with nature. The role of chance, the meaning of suffering in…
While the Bible offers a dazzling array of metaphors with which to think about the church, contemporary social scientists—informed no doubt by the influential Rational Choice Theory of Religion movement—often engage a market-based metaphor. With help from Gladys Ganiel’s Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland, this article demonstrates why this is an attractive yet deficient frame for examining…
The publication of To Change the World marks a new phase in the career of a distinguished sociologist. The author of a half-dozen books on religion and American culture, James Hunter goes where few social scientists dare to tread: the frontier between sociological analysis and theological reflection. The result is essential reading for those called…
In this paper, Christopher Gehrz explores the educational philosophies of two leading figures in the history of Swedish-American pietism: Carl H. Lundquist (president of Bethel College and Seminary, 1954-1982) and Karl A. Olsson (president of North Park College and Seminary, 1959-1970). While Olsson and Lundquist disagreed on several points, their common emphasis on “convertive piety”…
These outstanding and quite different contributions to the dialogue between faith and learning in the general area of contemporary psychology share the fundamental conviction that drives the faith/learning dialogue: that the grandeur and scope of Christian truth and of the Gospel of Jesus Christ defies any minimalist constraints to the merely spiritual or to the…
In the past two decades the evangelical academy has devoted a good deal of attention to the “Christian scholar” and “Christian scholarship.” While these discussions have born considerable fruit, they lack the scope to cast a vision for Christian higher education in general. Jim Halverson argues that the Christian academy needs to articulate a vision…
In broad terms, hospitality can be defined as “the friendly reception and treatment of guests or strangers” or “the quality or disposition of receiving and treating guests and strangers in a warm, friendly, generous way.” The words hospitality and hospital are both derived from the Latin hospes, signifying a guest, stranger, or foreigner—describing the connection between…
“After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them.” Mt. 25:19 As a faculty member on the ground, I find most of the e-mail communication I receive from educational administrators a burden and a distraction. For example, in one week recently I was told that I needed four different…
Mary Quinn, Laura Foote, and Michele Williams argue that the growth in online learning and in the number of adult students provides opportunities for Christian colleges and universities to reach a larger segment of this population. The authors note that with this opportunity, care must be taken to keep the integration of faith and learning…
In a dissertation proposal defense a few years ago, one of my colleagues declared to the nervous student, “Your paper sounds like a good Ed.D. but not a good Ph.D. You’re getting a philosophy degree [in the ancient sense of the word], so you need to make a contribution to theory.” First, I thought, “Do…
