InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
With Thinking Through Creation, Chris Watkin succeeds brilliantly in providing a short, clear and accessible volume that sets the reader on a path towards his stated goal of developing a biblical “interpretive grid” to understand culture (p.3).Read more…
The Christian church has left a profound impact on the world’s culture, at some times operating from a position of power, at others acting from the margins of society. Read more…
What does it mean to be made in God’s image? Read more…
This is to be the first in a series of five blog posts on the subject of the imago Dei, focusing particularly around a book called The Image of God in an Image Driven Age: Explorations in Theological Anthropology, edited by Beth Felker Jones and Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016).Read more…
Why does a book of the Bible spend so much time on a king who isn’t following God? Check out Kathy Cooper’s study notes for some ideas. Read more…
“There’s a difference between being functional in a culture and assimilating into that culture.” —Carl EllisRead more…
How do Daniel and his friends respond to efforts to assimilate them into Babylonian culture? And also to a crisis for all the wise men of Babylon? Kathy Cooper shares notes for Bible study groups. Read more…
Daniel is a great example of integrity and witness among a culture that does not honor God. It’s the story of someone who is a minority—in faith and ethnicity and culture—in the midst of a dominant, oppressive culture. Daniel is a great example of a believer who is navigating cross-cultural relationships, especially among powerful people.Read more…
Although I appreciate the “glocal” vision of an indigenizing and incarnational “GloboChrist,” I see the global incarnated in the local and local informing the global in local communities which richly embody the Body of Christ.Read more…
Overall I appreciate that instead of attempting to summarize and update fifteen years of intense writing (including five Eerdmans publications); Wells delivered the essence of his work. But I wished from the beginning that he included a limited number of footnotes and/or recommendations for further reading beyond references to his previous titles.Read more…
Steve Turner begins “Popcultured: Thinking Christianly About Style, Media and Entertainment” by asserting that we have all become “popcultured.” Read more…
“I am a screenwriter. . . . If you don’t have a good story, you won’t have a good movie, no matter who is acting in it or lighting it or directing it or producing it. If the story doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t work” (9). Yes, the writer creates and “the story is king” (10).Read more…
Going beyond Christian consumption of and ghettoization of 20th century popular, mass art requires: “An engaged, critical, and productive involvement with the popular arts—grounded in a faith vision that encompasses all of life and culture” (14).Read more…
Smith’s “core claim . . . is that liturgies—whether ‘sacred’ or ‘secular’—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. . . . [i.e.,] liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love” (25)Read more…
Summary: This is a survey and critique of the major philosophers and theologians of the West beginning with the Greek philosophers and early church fathers up to the present day, written from a reformed perspective.Read more…
Everyday Theology embodies the “theological lay of the cultural land” (7) and “Christian primer for cultural literacy” (11) I desire to inspire among members of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Emerging Scholars NetworkRead more…
Summary: The Christian message advanced in a Greco-Roman World prepared in many ways by both the failure of the Homeric gods and the classic philosophers. This book explores the intellectual antecedents to the gospel in pre-Socratic, Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian thought, culminating when Jerusalem meets Athens when Paul preaches on Mars Hill.Read more…
To Change the World has been hailed as “a seminal book on cultural formation and change, particularly insightful on how Christians (primarily evangelical) have understood and misunderstood culture change over the past 40 years or so” (Micheal Hickerson. Changing the World with James Davison Hunter. Emerging Scholars Network Blog, 8/2/2010). Read more…
In “He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace,” Richard Mouw offers a healthy form of “commonness,” “Seeking the Common Good,” and “preserv[ing] an area of mystery regarding God’s dealings with humankind” (90).Read more…
The book’s theme remains one of my primary life concerns, “What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call ‘modern Western culture’”? (1) Read more…
What a surprise to find in The Presence of the Kingdom, 2nd Edition (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmes & Howard Publishers, Inc., 1989), the foundation for Jacques Ellul’s perspective.Read more…
When completing the “manifesto,” my first response was “too much of a good thing” or “too many blocks of good material pasted together.” Read more…
In Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008), Michael Horton stands against Satan’s active opposition to the true and clear proclamation of the Gospel in the United States of America.Read more…
D.A. Carson summarizes and critiques H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology in an excellent manner. By doing such he sets up the importance of biblical theology as the lens for the Evangelical culture engagement.Read more…