The Pietist Schoolman
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Taking a Break
To save me from myself, I’m going to announce a one- or two-week hiatus from blogging. I have about six hundred pages of papers to grade, final exams to write (and grade), a summer online course to create, etc., etc. Put it all together and… Well, it’s hard to view my writing a single word … Continue reading
Featured Posts
Just two days after announcing via his Twitter feed that he had stage 4 cancer, Dallas Willard died yesterday. At the end of this post, I’ll offer my own small contribution to the collection of tributes that is already proliferating, but first a few words from people who knew him well: • Richard Foster wrote … Continue reading
Today’s semi-rerun takes me back pretty far in the life of this blog, to December 2011. But then, the debate goes back to the eve of the Civil War… Original Post: “This Day in History: John Brown’s Body“ Follow Up: “An Exchange on John Brown” (New York Review of Books, May 9, 2013) “I tend … Continue reading
There are several reasons that my employer is currently going through something of a budget crisis; one that’s hard to complain about is that our president and board adopted a new faculty compensation plan that would raise salaries, particularly at the level of full professor. (Some years ago the problem was that we weren’t competitive … Continue reading
Another not-quite rerun: this week I’m following up on topics that I’ve blogged about before and recently received new attention from other media or blogs. Original Post: “A Grand Experiment: Why Sports Belong in Higher Education“ Follow Up: “Room for Debate: Dropping the Ball” (nytimes.com, April 22) Last summer the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) … Continue reading
Back when I taught my history of World War I course on campus instead of gallivanting around the Western Front itself, I made extensive use of clips from The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, a documentary miniseries from PBS and the BBC. (It came out in 1996, but the website is … Continue reading
In last week’s historical sketch of the closures of American colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning, I closed by noting an oddly symmetrical pair of statistics: Of schools that closed between 1950 and 1979, 36% opened before 1945 Of schools that have closed since 1980, 37% opened before 1910 Much of the attrition of the … Continue reading
Briefly...
- 5/21/13 - Let me interrupt my blogging break for a moment to engage in some wanton self-promotion... Tomorrow afternoon, my colleague Sam Mulberry and I will be hosting West by Midwest, what we hope will become an annual event at Bethel dedicated to sharing innovative teaching ideas. We'll preview our new online version of Bethel's signature Christianity and Western Culture course, a few of our colleagues will join us in making informal pitches for new ideas, and I'll deliver a brief keynote address, "New Remedies, New Evils: Innovation, Teaching, and the Liberal Arts in a Digital Age." If you can't join us at Bethel in AC 203 from 1:30-3:30, you can follow along on Twitter: @cgehrz or #WxMW.
- 4/3/2013 - It's here: the finals of the Best Christian Book of All Time tournament, being held by InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars blog. Though Dietrich Bonhoeffer looked unstoppable in early rounds, his Cost of Discipleship lost out to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. In the other half of the bracket, Augustine's Confessions edged the representative from the fiction "region," J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. So we're deprived of an All-Inklings final — the Christian-literary equivalent of Duke-North Carolina or Michigan-Michigan State — but since I've already voted for Confessions as the best Christian book of all time, I can hardly complain. Cast your vote at the Emerging Scholars Facebook page!
- 2/13/13 - Move over, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, and, um, Mr. President... A new contender's ready to make a meteoric rise into the top five of Twitter accounts: the Pietism Studies Group!
The Anxious Bench
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The Pietist Impulse in Christianity
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