I do not claim to be a great teacher today, though I’d like to think I am getting better. When I first started teaching I was woefully inadequate to the task. Research and writing came naturally to me. Standing in front of a room full of people and commanding respect did not.Read more…
Scholar’s Call: The Joy of Becoming a Generalist
The first day of the fall semester of my senior undergraduate year, I ran into a friend of mine, a fellow history major, outside of the student union building at the research university we attended. We stopped and talked for a bit, updating each other on our lives and comparing our fall schedules. My friend had just been to the university bookstore, and he showed me a textbook he had just bought for a History of the Old South class that the history department was offering that fall.Read more…
Harper Lee and the Unintended Prescience of Go Set a Watchman
Last February, HarperCollins announced that it was going to publish this long-forgotten work by Lee, the Alabamian who put away her typewriter and spent decades fending off pesky questions about her abortive writing career after she was overwhelmed by the phenomenal success of To Kill a Mockingbird more than fifty years ago.Read more…
Surely the Lord Was in the Rare Books Room, Part 2 (Scholar’s Compass)
Christians in university settings can all too often find in the church and in academe two cultures that lead us to discouragement. The most uptight Pharisees can miss Christ just as easily as the most ardent skeptics by failing to see the God that they have misdefined in the first place. Read more…
Surely the Lord Was in the Rare Books Room, Part 1 (Scholar’s Compass)
Ever have a crisis of faith in the rare books room? Read more…
“Blessed Are the Successful?” (Scholar’s Compass)
A lot of Christian high school and college students across the nation fret over what God wants them to do with their lives. The older I get, the more tempted I am to say to the worriers that God wants them to go to bed and get a good night’s sleep. Political theorist Bryan T. McGraw does not reach quite that extreme a conclusion in his essay “Seeing What’s Around: Vision and Vocation.”Read more…
Advent: Christ in Our Context
Amid an atmosphere in which Christ seems so constantly present in so many contexts, Advent may seem superfluous as well as confusing. Is Christ our Savior? Our suffering servant? Our monitor/security guard? Some combination of the above?Read more…