Rudi Hayward completes his review of “Tracing the Lines: Spiritual Exercise and the Gesture of Christian Scholarship” by Robert Sweetman (Wipf & Stock 2016). The first part of this review ended with the paradox that either Christian scholarship is understood as so integrally Christian as to endanger the sense in which the Christian and non-Christian are engaged Read more
Whatever stage of research we’re at, we can benefit from a masterly overview of how everything fits together. And here at Faith-in-Scholarship we’re sometimes asked what introductions to Christian thinking we can recommend for academics. First, there are some general principles that can guide and inspire us, and that’s where a reading Read more
For Christmas a year ago I was given a book called ‘Wisdom for thinkers: An introduction to Christian philosophy’. It’s not a very thick book – under 200 pages – but fairly dense. So, having just finished it, I thought I’d tell you about it. The book was written as part of a series designed Read more
Reductionism is a key issue in many Christian critiques of other ideologies. Claims that the rich diversity of life as we know it can be explained by a single fundamental kind of reality often sound authoritative and sensational, but fundamental substances that are supposed to underlie what we experience are thereby attributed with a kind of Read more
Our series “What is good scholarship?” has examined nine aspects* of God’s created order in which we can discern norms – different kinds of “goods”. We believe these norms are recognised to varying degrees by everyone, thanks to God’s grace. At the same time, Christians know that pursuit of goodness Read more
Continuing our series on values for scholarship, David Hanson looks at God’s calling for humans to innovate. Scholarship is subject to cultural-formative norms. Humans never fabricate ex nihilo – only God does that. Yet the bringing of ‘new things’ into existence reflects God’s creative power in our calling to stewardly dominion of the world. Cooking a Read more
Our series on “good scholarship” has so far considered the logical and lingual aspects of reality. Here I want to explore a particular kind of offence against principles of both logical distinction and lingual clarification. Category errors arise when things are referred to in ways that imply they belong to a category of things Read more
At the FiSch Leader’s Conference, Andrew Basden showed us how a deeper understanding of God as Creator enables us to open up new avenues of meaning in our scholarship. What impact does your faith have on your scholarship? From ‘basic’ to more complex, there are several ways in which our Read more
One of the motivations for Faith in Scholarship is the conviction that Christian faith makes a difference to all areas of life. It’s not just the ‘religious’ areas of our lives that are affected, but, in the famous words of Abraham Kuyper, ‘There is not a square inch in the whole domain Read more