Bill Craig has presented us with an important book that does something that no other volume has done before, and that is to provide the reader with a comprehensive review of biblical, theological, and scientific data and arguments concerning the historical Adam. As a result, the book makes an important contribution to this (pun intended)…

It is a pleasure to participate in this symposium on Bill Craig’s new book, In Quest of the Historical Adam. But more than that, it is a responsibility: the issues are hardly of secondary importance. Indeed, for all that I think that one’s views on subjects such as whom to baptize, and what happens when…

There is much to like in this new book. For one thing, Bill Craig’s writing is clean as a whistle. His arguments are easy to follow and almost always illuminating. Writing this kind of monograph takes courage—most scholars prefer to hunker down in their silos, but Craig is a man on a mission, straddling multiple…

With In Quest of the Historical Adam, William Lane Craig enters into the current discussion about the historicity of the biblical original couple. At the outset, Craig cautions: People on both the left and the right can be expected to be upset with this book and, unfortunately, its author. All I can do is plead…

“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”   —James Baldwin, “A letter from a Region in My Mind” The New Yorker (1962) I appreciate this opportunity to discuss and debate the implications of my book Divine Variations. Many points were raised that I…

Terence Keel’s Divine Variations is a striking and provocative work of intellectual archaeology. Keel’s unearthing of theological patterns of thought in modern racist modes of thinking that have conventionally been understood as secular is arresting and illuminating. The book’s argument amounts to a serious re-consideration of received accounts of the history of ostensibly ‘scientific’ racism….

In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison notes that “regardless of the author, the readers of virtually all American fiction have been positioned as white.” She then raises a question: “What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced…

One of the least remembered facts of the John Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, often analyzed as a paradigmatic case study in the history of Christian fundamentalist history in North America is the influence of George Hunter’s Civic Biology textbook (1914) upon Scopes’s thought. After the controversy, Hunter removed certain parts on evolution from his…

“But, just as we got a little below Gravesend, we came alongside of a ship which was going away the next tide for the West Indies, her name was the Charming Sally, Captain James Doran; and my master went on board and agreed with him for me; and in a little time I was sent…

What does historic Christian theology have to do with modern racial science? There are good reasons to believe the answer is “nothing.” Since Max Weber advanced his theory of secularization, arguing that modern people are disenchanted with Christian theology and have divided labor into religious and non-religious institutions, influential scholars including John C. Green and…

We are pleased to announce the Henry Center Public Events for this academic year. The following six lectures are free and open to the public; registration is required. Join us, in person or online, for the opportunity to listen to leading theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers, as they explore human personhood in theological and scientific…

René Descartes introduced the modern notion of a “law of nature.” The Medieval Scholastic notion of “natural law” was more of a teleological notion; and in particular with respect to human beings, “natural law” described not how we in fact behave but how we ought to behave—the “unnatural” was, in effect, the deviant. The Cartesian…