The Pietist Schoolman

In case you missed them, a few of the nuggets found at this blog and others in the past week:

Here

• The first five days of my proposed World War I travel course had us imaginatively immersing ourselves in American history, contrasting pilgrimage with tourism while we jetted to London, identifying the four best movies about World War I, learning about Edwardian crises at the Museum of London, and watching a groundbreaking war documentary from 1916 during our visit to the Imperial War Museum.
• And we launched a new series on Anabaptist critiques of Pietism, starting with Harold Bender and his  “Anabaptist Vision.”
• I spent three days in Colorado as a delegate to the 126th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Covenant Church, where, among other things, we approved this resource paper. Expect a series of posts on it starting in the next week or two.
• Oh, and my qualms about picking titles aside, I decided that posts in a series could be labeled more descriptively and interestingly than simply numbering them in a sequence, so I went back through the week’s posts to change titles and update links.

Not Here

• One of the best things about being a college professor is that you get to watch your former students go on to do great things. From the ever eclectic mind of one of my favorite Bethel alumni came this creative proposal for social entrepreneurship, blending Mary Kay with solar power.
• Leith Anderson announced his retirement from Wooddale Church, a megachurch here in the Twin Cities. Unmentioned in the news reports was that Anderson, in addition to pastoring Wooddale and this parishioner, writing books, and running the National Association of Evangelicals, also chaired the Bethel University board of trustees a few years ago, and therefore played a small but indispensable role in granting me tenure.
• The results of this survey of the world’s evangelical leaders led Kyle Roberts to ask, “Could a decline of evangelical influence be a good thing for the gospel?” and Scot McKnight to start a new series, “Are you an evangelical?”
• My own state became the latest victim of the ideological polarization gripping American politics.
• Mark Schloneger, a Mennonite pastor in Virginia, reflected on Goshen College’s decision not to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” before its athletic events. On a related topic, I’ll be posting about the Pledge of Allegiance tomorrow, on July 4.
• One of the things I’ll take on is the myth of American exceptionalism. Dan Allosso, a doctoral student in history at the University of Massachusetts, wrote about that and the related myth of progress on the Historical Society blog, asking, “Can a historian work at the mythic level, without betraying history?”
• I don’t really like Led Zeppelin, and I wasn’t yet four years old when they played this concert. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying Chuck Klosterman’s retrospective on it. Or from making this my second oblique Zep reference in two weeks of The Pietist Schoolman. Did I mention that I don’t like the band?