Christian Humanist Profiles

When I got serious about Christian discipleship in the early nineties, Christian worldview was in the air.  The menace of secular humanism loomed large, and when I enrolled at Milligan College (now Milligan University), a Christian liberal arts college, several people in my life were quite pleased precisely because there, I might emerge with something called a Christian worldview and do battle against something called secular humanism.  That was more than thirty years ago, and Simon P. Kennedy has some questions for the folks who promoted that vision of Christian education.  His recent book Against Worldview from Lexham Press proposes not an abolition of Christian worldview but new postulates, namely wisdom and cultivation, as alternatives to the old war-metaphors.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Kennedy to the show.

In 1917 four seismic shocks rocked the human species: in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution brought a specter from Europe into the center of the world’s most expansive land empire.   In Europe, an armistice ended the Great War.  Around the world, a pandemic virus began to kill its millions.  And in America, the first jazz recording became available.  Communism and viruses and jazz had been around before then, of course, but history tells stories with sources, so here we are.  A hundred and eight years later, the span between Chicago Cubs World Series wins, the Reverend William Carter is here to join us and talk about the spirituality of it all.  Okay, mainly of jazz.  His book Thriving on a Riff from Broadleaf Books meditates on spiritual matters with one hand on the Bible and the other on the piano keys, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

With the obvious exception of Plato’s Phaedrus, really old books don’t spend much time on technology.  Perhaps the tools didn’t change fast enough.  Perhaps their writing materials were expensive enough that they didn’t want to spend time on instrumental matters.  Perhaps the questions just never occurred to them.  But some time in the modern era, folks started to write about the ways that our tools change and the ways that new sets of tools shape our souls for good and for ill.  And one of the moments when those changes were doing the most–the most harm or the most benefit we’ll talk about as the hour rolls along–was the nineteenth century.  Jeff Bilbro’s new book Words for Conviviality explores some of the writers engaging with those changes and invites us to hold up those nineteenth-century moments as mirrors to our own, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to invite him back on the show.

Liberty has always carried tricky questions with it.   Most folks in 2025 would agree that human beings should have liberty, but how one becomes free persists as a debate.  Do we spring fully free into this world?  Does participation in certain kinds of communities make us free?  Can education of this or that sort develop freedom?  This last question leads a conversation into the possibility of liberal arts, and Richard Detweiler’s book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs takes up not only a discussion of what makes an education a liberal-arts education but also why and how people in our moment still should make the case for liberal arts.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Detweiler to the show.

My own tradition within the Church was an early adopter of the motto “No creed but Christ.”  For what intentions are worth, my forerunners seem to have had good ones: in the historical moment, confessions and catechisms and boundary-documents of all sorts were proliferating among Protestant communities, and one way for a unity movement to make progress might be to pare away the documents that some but not all Christian communities took to be central.  That was the nineteenth century; now we’re in the twenty-first, and Dr. Phillip Cary has other work for the Nicene Creed to do: we need to learn how to ask Christian questions.  That’s what his recent book The Nicene Creed: An Introduction sets out to accomplish, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

Among education writers, the phrase “critical thinking” can run from nebulous notions to utter ciphers.  Few will disagree that critical thinking is good and needed, but relatively few will agree about what it is in the first place.  Colin Seale has not only written about critical thinking in more precise language but established institutions for developing critical thinking as a group of practices that teachers in different places can deploy for students of all kinds of ability levels.  His recent book Thinking Like a Lawyer, soon to be released in a new edition, proposes a core set of classroom sessions that develop flexibility and power in thinking, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Seale to the show.

When I was a novice in Biblical Studies Hans Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative invited me to consider not only the world that gave us the Bible but also the world that the Bible gives us, to read the canonical text as world-generating as well as world-contingent.  As I continued in the discipline, another world emerged, namely the world that teaches us to pose certain questions and attend to certain realities within the text.  And so I learned to understand the interplay of Torah and creation and wisdom and prophecy in these texts not only as emerging from their moments of composition–that never goes away–but also from the intellectual and cultural and military struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The stories of the Bible’s readers stand just as important as the stories of the Bible’s writers.  Katherine Dell’s book The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth: Creation and Covenant in Old Testament Theology renews our inquiries into all of these worlds, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome her to the show.

Slogans have always occupied our public attention, and the ways that an enemy redefines a slogan can be as important as the phrase’s original connotation.  We can learn a fair bit about public life and public speech just tracing the course and changes and counter-thrusts surrounding words and phrases like fake news, alt-right, social justice, and woke.  Sola Scriptura goes back centuries before these other terms, and its career likewise promises to shed light on some complex relationships between texts and communities whose common lives involve something called Bible.  Dr. Ben Witherington’s recent book Sola Scriptura: Scripture’s Final Authority in the Modern World from Baylor University Press explores both the ways Sola Scriptura as a phrase has changed and the important continuities that emerge when careful historians examine the Church’s relationships with the Holy Scriptures. 

Taken down to their etymological components, scriptures are any written texts and literature is any human craft involving letters, usually of some alphabet or another.  But etymological roots don’t go far making sense of the fascination and the division and the devotion and the emotion that literature and scriptures bring forth in readers of all sorts.  David Jasper has spent a career examining the literary character of Christian and Jewish Scriptures, the strange gravitational influences those Scriptures have exerted on recent literature, and all kinds of likewise compelling things, and his new collection of essays Scripture and Literature: A David Jasper Anthology traces some of the big questions that he’s pursued over the years for the benefit of just those readers, including us.

What is education for?  The oldest grand library of which I have any knowledge is the tablet-collection of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, and as far as I can tell, it’s mainly a collection of magic spells for the court sorcerers to draw from when they need this or that kind of wizardry.  And on the other end of things, in our little corner of the twenty-first century, some colleges seem to advertise exclusively (or pretty dang near exclusively) what kinds of financial benefits their schools offer to those who enroll.  Folks who have heard the Christian Humanist Radio Network talk about education over the years know that we tend to favor visions of education from somewhere in between historically and nowhere in the vicinity theologically, and that’s why I’m excited to have Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro and Dr. David Henreckson on the show to talk about The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education from Plough Press.  This collection, which they edited with Jessica Hooten Wilson, doesn’t really get into the sorcery end of things–just not that urgent any more, I suppose–but have a good deal to say about the aspirations and visions of education that in our moment stand as a compelling and faithful calls to Christian communities concerned with teaching what’s most worth teaching.