By: Jean Ollis on February 22, 2019
Imagine this…it’s 5:30am, Mountain Standard Time, and I’m up early because of the time change (It’s 7:30am EST at home). I’m staying in an adorable Airbnb in the footballs of the Rocky Mountains – and I have a room with a view – overlooking a lake with the mountains in the distance. The “super snow…
By: Jason Turbeville on February 22, 2019
Mark Noll gives a scathing review of Evangelical intellectualism in his 1994 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The first sentence give the reader the tone, ” The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” [1] He goes on to discuss the lack of intellectual integrity within not…
By: Nancy VanderRoest on February 22, 2019
At a funeral I officiated at this week, I told many stories about my special patient Margaret and how she truly touched my life. I noted that she was a bright light while here on earth, even though she had many struggles throughout her life. But I shared that Margaret believed that God’s glory is…
By: Trisha Welstad on February 21, 2019
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”[1] This quote opens the text of Mark Noll’s nearly twenty-year old assessment of evangelicals on their disinterest in and distance from influencing the wider culture with a distinctively Christ-centric intellect. Though there has been much debate about the content…
By: Karen Rouggly on February 21, 2019
We have a nest in our house. Not the kind that birds have, but the thermostat kind. We got it when we moved into this house a little over 4 years ago. What’s cool about a nest thermostat is that you can be wise with your energy consumption, and you get this little green leaf.…
By: Sean Dean on February 21, 2019
In the musical In the Heights the main character is Usnavi, a second-generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic living in Washington Heights in New York City. Over the course of his life he has been told that his goal in life needs to be to move back to the Dominican Republic, because that is home…
By: Mark Petersen on February 21, 2019
In a classic and essential text from 1994, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, evangelical historian Mark Noll writes with candor about the downward spiral of intellectual rigor at work in conservative North American Christianity. He traces the declining arc over centuries, beginning with the Reformation when there was still hope, through the influence of…
By: Jenn Burnett on February 21, 2019
I’m watching with interest the exploration of the identification of ‘toxic-masculinity.’ The term has not yet achieved precise definition, but it has arisen as both an academic and social project aimed at defining traditionally tolerated root beliefs about masculinity that have grown into destructive behavioural patterns. I would argue that a key contributing factor to…
By: Digby Wilkinson on February 21, 2019
This week’s book, Consuming Religion, Vincent J. Miller,[1] affords a well detailed and careful examination of two unavoidable interactions between religion and consumerism: religion as a consumer product and religious people as consumers of religious beliefs, images, and everyday products. Coming from an historic liturgical tradition, I see this disconnect between objects, symbols and even…
By: Jay Forseth on February 21, 2019
I heard a pastor preach who mentioned on any given Sunday he had at least three dozen PhD’s in the audience. He was the lead pastor in a town with a significant Christian liberal arts college. This particular pastor was a DMin graduate and no slouch, but he lamented to me how difficult it was…
By: Rhonda Davis on February 21, 2019
It seems that, without our consent, we have been undergoing a transformation from the inside out. Over decades of time, our consumer culture has changed the way we think, feel and behave. At least, this is what Vincent Miller proposes in Consuming Religion. In this book, Miller begins by explaining, “This is not a book…
By: Mike on February 21, 2019
Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and sequel Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind are books that evaluate, critique, provoke, and promote evangelicals toward a more intellectual relationship with Christianity. This post will read in and around both books and look for ideas, themes, and connections that can help my investigation…
By: Colleen Batchelder on February 21, 2019
Mark A. Noll, professor of History at Notre Dame, enraptures his readers and beckons them to understand the reasoning behind their lack of reason. He delves into the facets of evangelicalism from the lens of history and challenges his readers to question the validity of their faith, not the voracity of their pursuit. For years,…
By: Andrea Lathrop on February 21, 2019
I cannot imagine the Western Christian that could read Vincent Miller’s Consuming Religion and not have at least one prick of the heart. For me, there were many. It is extremely difficult, given our embeddedness in consumerism, to imagine a world of non-consumption Christendom. Miller gives me pause and greater discomfort on what was already uncomfortable. I…
By: Dave Watermulder on February 21, 2019
Ten years after publishing his classic book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, historian Mark Noll was in a reflective mood. This is the book that he is best known for, and whose famous first line that, “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind”[1], has been…
By: Chris Pritchett on February 21, 2019
Mark Noll’s work is largely a response to a wide-spread perception of the 20thcentury, namely, that Evangelicalism and scholarship seem to go together like oil and water. Noll wondered why a movement within orthodox Christianity can be filled with such passion, vigor, and commitment, while at the same time being averse to the tools of…
By: Harry Edwards on February 21, 2019
Neil Postman, an American social critic, professor and author, best known for his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, compared two dystopian visions of the future. The famous version is from George Orwell. He saw a future in which totalitarian states ruled with fear and control. His classic novel 1984 created a world in which its…
By: Jennifer Williamson on February 21, 2019
France. The birthplace of the Enlightenment. Here, one must be competent (or at least conversant) in philosophy in order to graduate from High School. Thinking and debating are national pastimes. In response to the Gilets Jaunes—the Yellow Jackets—President Emanuel Macron wrote a letter to all the people of France inviting them to participate in a…
By: Greg on February 21, 2019
Mark Noll writes,“coming to know Christ provides the most basic possible motive for pursuing the tasks of human learning”.1 His critique of evangelicals and their lack of desire to pursue deep thinking and constant questioning of concepts that should make us hunger for truth has encouraged me to seek how those outside the Western world…
By: Rev Jacob Bolton on February 19, 2019
I recently had a fascinating conversation with Elysa Hammond. Elysa is the Vice President of Clif Bar and their Director of Environmental Stewardship. Simplified, her job is to make sure Clif Bar uses the most delicious, healthy, organic, sustainable, earth friendly ingredients in their products – and then to make sure that those products are…
