Monthly Newsletter of Christian Scholars Review - Issue #13

In a February guest lecture to Christian graduate students at Baylor, Calvin University professor David Smith suggested that one of the best ways to stimulate Christ animated learning is to visit another culture. I could not agree more.

I recently completed a trip to Australia to study emerging (within the past three decades) Christian colleges, university colleges, and universities. Australia was the only continent on which the first universities began as secular. Furthermore, it did not have a Christian university until 1991. Now, it has eight institutions (6 Protestant and 2 Catholic). In fact, Australian Catholic University is now the largest Catholic university in the English-speaking world.

What I found inspiring about this recent growth is that it is occurring in a post-Christian culture where the government and professional entities are not always sympathetic to Christian education. Yet, through God’s help and winsome effort, I found new and inspiring institutional creativity occurring even in the midst of this environment. It reminds me that Christians who confine their gaze to America and then despair about Christianity’s declining cultural influence often fail to see unique ways that creative and redemptive work can still move forward. Visiting other cultures gives us the ability to see with different eyes.

For those looking for in-depth reflections on the recent journey of evangelical scholarship and its contemporary state, we encourage you to read Joel Carpenter’s address that was given upon the 50th anniversary of CSR, “Reawakening Evangelical Intellectual Life.” It is available online and in the most recent issue of Christian Scholar’s Review.

Furthermore, if you have not done so yet, we would encourage you to view the panel discussion that took place at Wheaton College with Mark A. Noll concerning the updated edition of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The discussion, titled “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in a Social Media Age,” includes panelists Theon Hill, Karen Johnson, Matthew Milliner, and Christa Tooley. Mark Noll offers a response. Karen An-hwei Lee serves as the moderator and Philip Ryken serves as the host. 

Our hope is you and your colleagues will consider forming a reading group concerning this edition of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. To aid in your efforts, Christian Scholar’s Review partnered with the book’s publisher, the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, to prepare this discussion guide, which is available for free download.

In certain STEM fields, Christian scholars lack helpful resources to promote Christ-Animated Learning. Thus, we want to alert you to a new book coming out this month from one of our blog contributors, Derek Schuurman, as well as co-authors, Ethan J. Brue and Steven H. VanderLeest. It is entitled, A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers. It is certainly a book that we will be adding to our list of top Christ Animating Learning books.

Recently, I and a group of graduate student co-authors published an essay about the state of Christ-Animated Graduate Education in Christian universities. To put it bluntly, we were disappointed by our findings. As we summarize in the abstract, “We found only one-third of the graduate programs demonstrated even one piece of evidence demonstrating Christian distinctiveness.”

In thinking about this problem, I wondered why Christian graduate educators do not have at least one core course required of all graduate students addressing the relationship of Christianity to scholarly creation and redemption (what would hopefully be a primary focus of graduate work).

As mentioned in my introduction, sometimes one’s ideas already are being implemented in other countries and cultures. While visiting the University of Notre Dame Australia, I discovered that they already required one course of all graduate students (in other words its an interdisciplinary class), that seeks to address questions of applying the Catholic moral tradition to graduate learning and scholarship. Sometimes one finds that a Christian university that only started 30 years ago is far head of those that have existed for over a hundred and fifty years.