Chris shares some reflections on being a Christian scholar who blogs and podcasts. Read more
Chris shares some reflections on being a Christian scholar who blogs and podcasts. Read more
American Christian higher education boasts many worthy study-abroad programs. But one shines with special luster: Gordon College’s program in Orvieto, Italy. I have recently had the opportunity to teach there. Why does it shine so brightly? Let me count the ways: Many programs are so-called “bubble programs.” Students are technically abroad, but the program does little to integrate them into the patterns and ethos of the host country. Not so with Gordon’s program. Students regularly participate in the choir at… Read more
Tom Brady describes his spirituality as a bit uncertain and eclectic. Raised Roman Catholic, he now seems to be firmly in the “spiritual but not religious” camp. Many people leave the church of their childhood. Few of those apostates, however, dedicate their professional lives to contravening the teachings of Jesus, however. Brady is one of those few. As Tom Brady gets ready for his twenty-second Super Bowl, I have completed a careful analysis of the many ways that New England’s… Read more
Translation is a difficult and devious process. You can render the individual words used perfectly and precisely, but still fall short of conveying the underlying concepts, without using lengthy footnotes. Here, I will look at a specific issue in reading and interpreting the New Testament, namely the question of slavery and freedom. A World of Slaves In the Greek-speaking world of the first century AD, there was a critical difference between free (eleutheros) and slave (doulos). Each represented a very… Read more
On Saturday the world will again mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the anniversary of Red Army troops liberating the network of extermination and concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Both victims and perpetrators fully understood the importance of remembering the Holocaust. Indeed, the fact that we can remember that terrible event this weekend — that you can read this post right now — is a testimony to the heroic efforts of Jews to document their own extermination… at the hands of people who expected a… Read more
In the wake of Johns Hopkins University announcing a major gift for its philosophy department, Chris invites wealthy readers to support the mission of Christian colleges. Read more
British historian Niall Ferguson recently published The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power (Penguin), which has been getting a lot of attention. I am writing a full length review of the book, but right now, I want to focus on its implications for Christian history. The book draws on social network analysis. If you want to understand why somebody is important or significant in a particular era, Ferguson argues, it is very useful to… Read more
I have blogged repeatedly on various esoteric and occult themes, including Freemasonry and Theosophy, so hence my interest in this recent book, which I review here. My approach differs from that of other reviewers in that I stress what seems to me to be a critical American dimension of the book: Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2017). 422 pages. In writing Hitler’s Monsters, Eric Kurlander has performed a valuable and indeed… Read more
From the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency, I have deeply disliked his anti-immigrant rhetoric. While I disagree with some of Trump’s actual policy positions (to the best I can discern them) on immigration, on many issues Christians might very reasonably disagree. Do porous borders lead to gangs smuggling unaccompanied minors into the United States? Do high levels of immigration depress wages in the United States and strain city and state budgets? And so forth. There is no… Read more