As part of the seminar on Pietism that I’m leading this weekend at Bethlehem Covenant Church in Minneapolis, I’ll devote an hour or so to my chief area of interest: Pietist models of education. In doing some reading for that talk, I revisited an interesting document from my own denomination‘s history: a working paper from … Continue reading
Here • The death of Levon Helm had me thinking about one of my favorite Martin Scorsese movies, the concert film The Last Waltz. • I continued my series on Confessing History, a promising collection of essays rethinking how Christians do history, with a post on three chapters dealing with “Identity.” • Former North Park … Continue reading
Today I’m going to wrap up a series of posts on the notion of Christian colleges looking to a “usable past” for guidance as they consider their missions and identities. Thus far, we’ve mostly found that schools founded by denominations originating (at least in part) in Pietism have not found such utility in that tradition. … Continue reading
Today we continue to consider why, for most historians and leaders of colleges and universities founded by Pietist denominations, Pietism seems not to provide a “usable past,” a living history capable of sustaining a distinctive mission and identity. In the first part of this post, I suggested, first, that this might be a byproduct of … Continue reading
We’ve rounded the bend and are more than halfway home in our preview of The Pietist Impulse in Christianity. Today: part five examines four manifestations of the Pietist impulse among Swedish and Norwegian Christians (both in the Old World and New). For many, this would seem an obscure chapter in the history of Pietism. But … Continue reading
Did you know? The members of the NHL champion Boston Bruins will have three full months between their Game 7 triumph and the beginning of training camp in which to play golf, go to the beach, and do silly things with the Stanley Cup. (Of course, members of my Minnesota Wild and the league’s thirteen … Continue reading
I don’t know anyone who writes who enjoys coming up with a title. Even the bountifully gifted writing staff of the underappreciated sitcom NewsRadio simply gave up and started copping titles from Led Zeppelin albums twenty episodes into the show’s run. Part of me suspects that we shouldn’t seek to improve on the example of … Continue reading