Ryan Faber

“Prayer is there all the time, but you don’t see the significance or value of what it could be,” says Alyssa Pokharel, a Calvin University junior from Kathmandu, Nepal. She has experienced prayer in classes, in dorms, in bible studies, and before meals during her time at Calvin. “It’s everywhere. It’s embedded into the way we live out our faith,” she said.

African church leaders were among those who commissioned Paul and Barnabas for their first missionary journey. One of my goals in teaching African church history is to dispel the myth all too present in Africa that Christianity is a white person’s religion. A quick survey of early church history helps. Many of the most important early theologians—Tertullian, Athanasius, and Augustine—were African. But particularly revealing for my students is a study of Africans in the New Testament.

Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood is less an account of how the subjugation of women became gospel truth than it is an argument against patriarchy. Barr, an associate professor of history at Baylor University, presents the evidence that led her to disavow complementarianism. She hopes her readers will do the same because, in Barr’s estimation, complementarianism is not only wrong but also dangerous. Barr writes of “the ugliness and trauma inflicted by complementarian systems” (p.