Walter Brueggemann did not only teach me to read the Bible: he taught me to read.  In the twenty-two years since I first read A Theology of the Old Testament…

I don’t often talk about my own high-school years on this podcast, but I remember in high-school jazz band playing a Christmas medley called “Heaven and Nature Swing.” It led…

 Some intellectuals are famous, and some are intellectual-famous.  N.T. Wright appeared on The Colbert Report, and Reinhold Niebuhr testified before Congress, and Cornel West was in a couple Matrix movies. …

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  I pray those words every Sunday morning at Bogart Christian Church, and I think I have a basic…

Every ethics presumes a sociology.  That formula has followed me through nearly twenty-five years of study, and its source text, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, has been a constant conversation…

When we set several theologies next to each other, naming their core claims helps us to make sense of their relationships, even as we grant that more complexity rewards careful…

As a student in a good Old Testament Introduction class will be able to tell you, Genesis 1 borrows structures and symbols and maybe even vocabulary from Babylonian texts like…

When my students ask me–and soon enough they learn not to ask me–I always tell them I’m an unrepentant left-winger; after all, I’ve never thought that a Capetian monarch should…

Some truths seem self-evident once somebody has spoken them, but someone needs to make that move.  So here goes: whenever any of us teaches, that teacher teaches something.  Teaching a…

 I’ve had a working hypothesis for quite a while now that stories about the devil tell us about as much about an author’s priorities as anything else.  Milton’s devils and…

When I started my undergraduate years at Milligan College in 1995, its interdisciplinary Humanities sequence was already a well-established hallmark of its educational project.  In each of my first four…

 I’m still a young enough professor that I don’t remember a time before “critical thinking” was a buzzword in the profession.  Back in the fall of 2000, when first I…

Download or Stream this Episode Subscribe to Christian Humanist Profiles In Shakespeare’s plays, Rome as a setting invites new kinds of questions: in a narrative universe separate from the claims…

Download or Stream this Episode Subscribe to Christian Humanist Profiles I’m old enough to remember when the popular press painted philosophy professors as peddlers of postmodernism, heedless of truth and…

Download or Stream this Episode Subscribe to The Christian Humanist Podcast Dan Dawson, Blake Miller, and Nathan Gilmour talk about the strange path of the noun “deconstruction” and its unpredictable…