Human Trustees

Clearly, the Trump administration has taken the axe to the American scientific establishment, which, ironically, is the envy of the entire world. The U.S. National Institutes of Health, or NIH, is composed of 24 grantmaking institutes and centers in all. I went to hear Francis Collins, who directed the NIH from 2009 to 2025, talk about a new book of…

Pakistani American academic, Ahmed Afzaal, an associate professor of religion at Concordia College in Minnesota, departed from his research and writing on religion when he published Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse (Cascade Books, 2023). Our paths intersected, Afzaal and I, when in 2012 I co-edited an issue of the journal Worldviews: Global Religions,…

One of the great German theologians of the twentieth century, Jürgen Moltmann (b. 1926), published a book in 2019 that neatly summarizes some key themes of his monumental work: The Spirit of Hope: Theology for a World in Peril. His 1965 (German edition) groundbreaking book had been on Christian hope: A Theology of Hope. Then among his numerous books, at…

In the first half of this post, I introduced Native American theologian George E. “Tink” Tinker and used some of the material in his book, American Indian Liberation, to offer us a double reality check: first, the horrors committed by the colonial masters in the Americas, starting with Columbus and stretching the United States’ genocide of the Native populations in…

This will be a two-part blog post about one Native American theologian (George E. “Tink” Tinker) and his most famous book, American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty. But this is only partially a book review. In the second half I connect some of these thoughts to portions of a paper I just submitted to the journal Missiology. Indigenous peoples,…

Scott Pruitt, who until last week was President Trump’s Environmental Agency (EPA) Administrator, resigned amidst numerous ethics scandals. Yet he was ruthlessly effective in carrying his boss’s mandate to dismantle as many Obama-era regulations as possible. His deputy Andrew Wheeler, now the acting head of the EPA, will no doubt continue where he left off. Of course, this was predictable.…