The Pietist Schoolman

A relatively short links post, as I’m spending Friday afternoon and Saturday morning at the annual meeting of the Northwest Conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church.

Here…

• “Hey, Pietist Schoolman, can you tell me what percentages of colleges to open each decade since 1900 failed to survive it? Oh, can you throw in a scattergraph?” Sure.

• In shameless ploys for hits from bibliophiles and the Grantham, Pennsylvania metropolitan area, I professed my love for libraries and John Fea’s “virtual office hours.”

…There and Everywhere

• My favorite librarian this week: Abdel Kader Haidara, who hid nearly 300,000 medieval manuscripts from the Islamists who terrorized Timbuktu last year.

• One library book that I checked out more than a few times growing up was From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Its author, E.L. (Elaine Lobl) Konigsburg died Friday.

• Alan Jacobs on C.S. Lewis: children’s literature as “schooling for desire.”

• Now that the Digital Public Library of America has been open for a week or so, the reviews are starting to accumulate, including those by Lincoln Mullen and the more conflicted Scott McLemee.

• Wednesday marked the 98th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Armenians.

• Don Miller thinks that the Kermit Gosnell case has the potential to “serve as a catalyst for a broad conversation about when life begins and what we are going to do as a country on the issue of abortion,” but he urged fellow pro-lifers to respond with a “Christ-centered methodology of communication” rather than the angry self-righteousness of the past.

• I’m not sure that Bart Ehrman and I share the same definition of what it means for an early Christian gospel to be “authentic,” but I can’t quibble with his examples of the “apocryphal” — e.g., the gospel that has Jesus seduce a woman he pulls from his side.

• After getting the chance to teach John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, Greg Peters came away with “a new vision and vigor for what I do – teach general education (or, in Newman’s terminology, Universal Knowledge) for the purpose of educating students liberally in a university.”

• I’ll bet John Henry Newman also reacted this way when his students failed to staple their papers. (And yes, the stapler was invented several years before his death in 1890.)