A Guide for Skeptics of Anthropogenic Climate Change
Author: Larry Molnar, Professor of Physics and AstronomyMinds exclusive
The comment that has been in my head for some time, even before the recent controversy over the e-mails of some climate change researchers, is that while climate policy is a complex subject, one on which different people will have different viewpoints based on differing personal advantages and disadvantages as well as differing moral codes, the basis of anthropogenic climate change is simply not that controversial. Apparent controversy results from talking around the core issues.
On Boundaries: Let Science Be Science? Let Religion Be Religion?
Author: Arie Leegwater, Professor Emeritus of ChemistryPerspectives on Science and Christian Faith
In a perceptive article, Peter Harrison, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, describes how the dual categories of science and religion have been invented over time. Not only are the boundaries of science in flux, only becoming somewhat stable in the nineteenth century, but so are those of religion, having been constructed earlier during the European Enlightenment, usually in terms of a set of propositional beliefs. This demarcation or boundary issue, what is properly science and what is properly religion, has also exercised the Christian community.
In Defense of Extravagance
Author: Jennifer Holberg, associate professor of EnglishPerspectives
Scrapbooks and cakes, even in superabundance, are perhaps little to show for a life. Yet, they are undeniable witnesses to the heart of the gospel—and one of the scandals of the cross: God’s lavish gesture of love.
Glittering Vices
Author: Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoungBrazos Press
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung explores the seven deadly sins from a historical and biblical perspective.
Chasing Emily: A Review of ‘Emily’s Ghost’
Author: Jennifer Holberg, Professor of EnglishBooks & Culture online
Emily Brontë hears dead people.
Or at least she does according to the latest entry in the Brontë family literary sweepstakes, Denise Giardina’s Emily’s Ghost. To be fair, Emily only gets all Sixth Sense-y in the beginning and ending sections of Giardina’s novel (somehow, I guess, the otherworldly presences just aren’t as convenient or necessary in the vast middle chapters of the novel). And lest the reader believe that these voices are evidence of schizophrenia or a matter of purely imaginative inner dialogue (the latter a possibility that Anne Brontë raises at one point in the novel), Giardina has her Emily affirm quite forcefully the reality of her auditory companions. What’s more, Giardina’s Emily is ardently and actively political (a Chartist, no less); strongly and nobly rebellious against everything well-established in early Victorian society; and the participant in a passionate, if unconsummated, romance. Throw in a pinch of plot elements taken from Jane Eyre and a dash of Jo March-style hair-chopping, and you begin to get the idea of the portrait of Emily Brontë this book gives us.
How does your work shape your view of human nature?
Author: Nathan L.K. Bierma, Calvin Institute of Christian WorshipThinkChristian
“The View from Inside an Ambulance,” originally published in Esquire, is a powerful essay by paramedic Chris Jones on his experiences dealing with death on a daily basis. His work both confronts him with, and numbs him to, human fragility. His closing story about reviving a man presumed dead, in front of the man’s son, has a hint of resurrection in it.
The article reminded me that our line of work—the way we use our God-given gifts—shapes our view of human nature
