The Pietist Schoolman

Here

• How technological innovation spread over the course of the twentieth century. I still can’t believe a majority of Americans before the mid-1990s didn’t own a dishwasher!

• RIP John Keegan.

• More Albums A to Z: Elvis Costello’s King of America.

• Did you ever think that Mrs. Doubtfire looked a little bit like an Eisenhower — and not Mamie? This movie might be for you…

• Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations for the Wiki era: using Kindle’s highlighting feature to see which passages of popular books resonate with readers.

• And thanks again to Jim Rohrer for writing the first guest post in Pietist Schoolman history, on Pietism as non- or anti-denominationalism. Here’s how you can write for this blog!

There and Everywhere

• Back from one extended stay out of the country and about to embark on another, one of my favorite former students wondered why Americans don’t seem to like each other that much.

• Did the NCAA sanction against Penn State that vacated its football wins from 1998 to 2011 “rewriting history”? One historian’s take.

• More highlights from the New York Times‘ fascinating set of blogs: a tribute to the literary merits of sportswriting (and check out my own post on baseball writing) and an introduction to disagreement as a field within philosophy.

• One TV Sherlock Holmes has thoughts about a new one (coming on CBS this fall).

• I liked Christopher Benson’s review of three recent attempts by Christian writers to discuss sexuality…

• …and this tribute to pro-life Democrats Robert Casey and Sargent Shriver from one of our Pietist Impulse in Christianity contributors. (H/T First Thoughts)

• And Roger Olson’s response to Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine exemplified how a critique can be charitable and robust at the same time. (While you’re there, click on the link about Jonathan Edwards at the top of the page…)

• No answer to the problem of evil will satisfy everyone, but I appreciated how this Denver pastor asked where God was during the shootings at Aurora.

• One of the iconic churches in the history of American evangelicalism seems to exemplify evangelicals’ rediscovery of social justice.

• A critique of “culture wars” as a “controlling metaphor,” one that “shapes our minds, our discourse, and our actions in ways we often fail to recognize by virtue of its ubiquity.”

• Reading through the Talmud, one page a day, for seven years…

• Last year I admitted to not thinking much about heaven or hell, while acknowledging that I would probably feel differently if I lived a less comfortable life. Trevin Wax developed that latter point considerably in this essay for Christianity Today, arguing that justice and judgment were inseparable.

• And this morning at our department blog, I suggested “Weekend Reading” on topics like… the milk carton; bombs, bombs, and more bombs; Civil War baseball and commemoration; Pericles on democracy; Founding Fathers on the Lord’s Prayer; and the historicity of the Book of Mormon.