By: Jer Swigart on January 28, 2020
Observing that many of the most successful and well-educated business people of his day were Protestants, Max Weber, in his essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, sought to answer the question: what is the connection between Protestantism and the emergence of the capitalism of his day? Drafted less as an economic expose,…
By: Dylan Branson on January 28, 2020
Reading through Weber’s The Protestant Ethic raised a lot of questions and contained a lot of thought provoking ideas. I can honestly say that the notion that Calvinism serves as one of the roots of Capitalism has never crossed my mind, so this was a deep dive into new territory. As I was reading, one…
By: Darcy Hansen on January 28, 2020
There is a deep hunger within each person, a wondering, a longing for a grounded Presence. For millennia, we’ve been searching. We want to know there’s more to this life then what is visible. So, we look about for the Divine, the God of Creation, Who spoke and all we see came to be.…
By: Shawn Cramer on January 27, 2020
Capitalism at is worst develops suffocating monopolies. The field of innovation is currently monopolized by the Mammonic grip of the evolving spirit of capitalism. Furthermore, innovation has been taken hostage by the Protestant ethic, and “the common good” requires innovation to be rescued from its inclusion as an agent of perpetual commodification and resituated as…
By: Karen Rouggly on January 26, 2020
*Please note, this blog was written while in the middle of the flu. Not just any flu, THE flu. The one that hit hard this week, spiking my fever to 103 and then took my entire body down to the depths of depravity with it. While I have been fever-free for 24 hours, it’s only…
By: John Muhanji on January 26, 2020
The title of the book threw me out of the balance “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” I am coming from an evangelical tradition of the Friends church in Africa, and this title was scared for sure. The church in Africa was established by evangelical movement from North America beginning from the 19th and 20th…
By: Nancy VanderRoest on January 26, 2020
Learning to grow into one’s faith can be a tricky journey. Growing up as a Catholic, I knew that I was in the “right” religion. As Catholics, we always understood that we were “number 1” in God’s book. We had beautiful Bibles, which were large and ornate, and we polished them every week to keep…
By: Wallace Kamau on January 25, 2020
Having resources, position or knowledge is one thing and maximizing their usage for better results is quite another thing. Leadership is about mobilizing people and other resources to achieve the set objectives and maximizing the results. The measure of one’s leadership ability is the results that you produce. Mark Knoll, in analyzing the Evangelical churches,…
By: Digby Wilkinson on January 25, 2020
Good grief I am getting old. I have the 1994 edition of Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind sitting on my shelf which I read in 1995.[1] On first reading, I remember thinking it was a rather harsh experience, but once I realised it was mainly about Americans, I felt so much better. However,…
By: Mary Mims on January 24, 2020
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is a fascinating work by Mark A. Noll of the study of the evangelical mind, and how evangelicals, especially modern American evangelicals, “have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life.”[1] Noll is a prolific writer and research professor of history at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, specializing in…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on January 24, 2020
John Fea describes Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind as continuing to serve as a guiding light, an intellectual road map, and a source of inspiration decades later for many of Noll’s readers. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind convinced Fea that the life of the mind was a legitimate calling despite his…
By: Tammy Dunahoo on January 24, 2020
In John’s account of Jesus before Pilate there is an interesting exchange that I reflected on while reading this week: Jesus answered, “For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world— to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked, “What is truth?”[1]…
By: Jenn Burnett on January 24, 2020
I fell in love with academia by accident. In fact I would not have even stumbled upon my love of learning without the requirements of the church for ministry. While I grew up in a mainline denomination that fully affirmed academia, I have always been drawn to the inclusive nature of Jesus. The incarnation points…
By: Rhonda Davis on January 24, 2020
I understand where Noll is coming from in his, albeit harsh, critique of the “innovative theologies” of the Pentecostal and Holiness movements.[1] The eschatology formed from the revivalist movement, which taught believers to forego thinking and education for the sake of evangelism due to the imminent return of Christ, did cause many Pentecostals to diminish…
By: John Muhanji on January 24, 2020
It is fascinating to read what Taylor’s thesis on secularism in our society during this 21st century. He believes that what is wrong with enlightenment quest of progress is what is coming out as secularization that lies behind the enlightenment, what comes to me with controversial issues and asking specific questions from the Africa perspectives.…
By: Harry Edwards on January 23, 2020
The scandal of the Evangelical mind, regrettably, is all around us. It is in popular media, social media, the public square, politics, universities and in other accessible spaces. Embarrassingly, we just cannot avoid it. To check my claim, I decided just now as I’m writing this, to turn on the radio and tune in to…
By: Andrea Lathrop on January 23, 2020
Some of my cohort mates may have missed it but I slipped in a confession in our discussion last week. I had quickly said that I have times when I feel slightly embarrassed by my faith tradition. This occasionally occurs when discussing doctrinal matters. subjects more intellectual in nature or when thinking of charismatic charicatures.…
By: Steve Wingate on January 23, 2020
We need government. We need to work from the Kingdom of God. And we need to seek to understand what our responsibilities are and how to be Christ-like within systems we often cannot control which are designed to maximize self-centered gain. We are not mere principles of use for complex systems of our societies. Scripture…
By: Rev Jacob Bolton on January 23, 2020
Mark Noll keeps the Canadian connection alive, as all of our authors so far this semester have strong ties to Jenn’s motherland. Mark Noll, former Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, is current Professor of History at Regent College in Vancouver. A prolific author, and high achieving academic, perhaps his most impressive…
By: Sean Dean on January 23, 2020
In his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind Mark Noll is quick to admit that the scandal is in fact the lack of an Evangelical mind.i Tracing much of the issue back to Evangelicalism’s fundamentalist roots he mourns the lack of desire to explore how the many facets of God relate to the world.…
