The Pietist Schoolman

Aside from advertising the opening of registration for our April 20 colloquium on Pietism, announcing a new podcast episode, and revealing the most popular posts in the last month, there wasn’t much happening here while I was on spring break. Meanwhile, in other parts of the blogosphere…

• One more post on Joseph Kony… Like almost all of the other pieces on the subject written by Africans, it is mostly critical of the Invisible Children film: “Campaigns like ‘Kony 2012’ aspire to frame the debate about these criminals and inspire action to stop them. Instead, they simply conscript our outrage to advance a specific political agenda — in this case, increased military action.”

• The death of Trayvon Martin has caused much reevaluation of race in American society, this version courtesy of Jay Phelan.

• RIP Paul Boyer: one of this country’s leading historians, Boyer died of cancer last Saturday. I’m not an American historian by training, and so haven’t had occasion to read most of his best-known works, but in my Cold War studies I have had the pleasure of reading his essays on nuclear war, By the Bomb’s Early Light. Devin Manzullo-Thomas posted the funeral announcement, and reflected on Boyer’s place as one of the most famous products of the Brethren in Christ Church.

• You don’t see many blog posts that start with a Frederick Wilson Taylor reference… Let alone one that goes on to praise the Amish.

• Eugene Peterson gave Jana Riess a rare interview about The Message, now available in study Bible format with Peterson’s own notes.

• As a Pietist, it was intriguing to read this Catholic perspective on piety — or rather, pietas, a Latin term that folded in love for family and country as well as God. (H/T Matthew Cantirino — who elsewhere gave some free publicity to the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, or NYCAMS, a program administered by my colleagues in the Bethel University art department.)