Fides Quaerens Intellectum

As I’ve been making my way through professor Leland Ryken’s (father of current Wheaton College president Phillip Ryken) book Redeeming the Time:  A Christian Approach to Work and Leisure, I’ve been reminded once again of the importance of viewing life holistically.  The Puritans certainly emphasized

This week Trent Wilbanks and I are team teaching our final module for the academic year.  Cultural transformation is the topic, and Andy Crouch’s book Culture Making is the backbone text.  Concept of the week?  Power.  Crouch says that cultural power is “the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good.”  As it turns out, [...]

Marana (my wife) and I recently returned from a cruise vacation to the Bahamas, the purpose of which was to celebrate the completion of the Ph.D. that I started back in the fall of 2000.  Fantastic experience (the cruise, that is); ready to go back.  One afternoon a small advertisement on the wall of the [...]

As I continue to work my way through the Hitchens book god is not Great (2007), I’m simultaneously trudging through a recent work by one of Hitchens fellow New-Yorkers, Rev. Tim Keller. It’s pretty clear that Keller, pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, churned out The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of [...]

A few days ago a I picked up highly acclaimed atheist Christopher Hitchens’ book god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (no, that’s not a typo…he chose–or perhaps the publisher did– a lower-case “g” in coming up with his title). Hitchens, a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research [...]

This past week a 19 year-old student sat in my office troubled by a certain aspect of her past, namely the fact that she descends from a long line of conservative Pennsylvania Dutch pacifists. For a few weeks at IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net) we’ve been working through systems and issues in ethics, and it was only [...]

I recently picked up Dinesh D’Souza’s new book at the urging of a friend and colleague, and I’ve been very pleased with it thus far.  The chapter on the problem of evil is required reading for the IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net) students for next week, which is when we rollo out the module on evil and [...]

Since I started graduate school in 1997 I’ve appreciated the thoughtfulness that University of Chicago scholar Jean Bethke Elshtain has brought to bear on seemingly countless topics of faith and culture.  In my most recent wanderings through an as yet unread book on faith and learning in my personal library (although I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I [...]

“The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education would primarily train people to be able to think in Christian categories…” -T.S. Eliot

IMPACT 360′s (www.impact360.net) guest professor this week is Mr. John Stonestreet.  Stonestreet is Associate Professor in the Bible Department at Bryan College (www.bryan.edu)– teaching courses on worldview, apologetics and cultural exegesis–and is the Director of Summit Ministries, Eastern Region (www.summit.org).  He’s teaching on how Christian worldview ought to impact our understanding of bioethical challenges in this day [...]