April 16th is finally here, which means that the first episode of The Pietist Schoolman Podcast is available on iTunes! It features my recent conversation with Roger Olson, Foy Valentine Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at Baylor’s Truett Seminary and author of numerous books, including The Journey of Modern Theology and Reformed and Always Reforming.
Of course, Roger also contributed a pivotal chapter to our Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education: Forming Whole and Holy Persons and joined fellow contributor Christian Collins Winn to publish Reclaiming Pietism: Retrieving an Evangelical Tradition. So he’s the perfect first guest on a podcast series meant to extend the conversation in our book and enlarge it to fold in related topics and other perspectives.
When we talked, Roger not only expanded on what he meant, in his Pietist Vision chapter, that a Pietist vision of higher education is both “Christ-centered” (or, better, “Jesus-centered”) and “person-centered,” but he talked about its implications for seminaries like Truett. And perhaps of most interest to a larger audience, we discussed the centrality of a Pietist ethos to evangelicalism, why it seems to have been marginalized by a more “scholastic” impulse within that movement, why neither of us is ready to jettison “evangelical,” and whether or not a new Pietist movement is brewing.
You can find The Pietist Schoolman Podcast on iTunes and FeedBurner, and I’ll post episode summaries both here and at The Christian Humanist website. Roger’s co-author Christian Collins Winn will be the guest next week, when we talk about civil discourse, the virtue of hope, and how Baptists understand Pietism. Then we’ll exit April with an episode focused on interfaith dialogue and engagement.
I hope all my readers will become listeners as our conversations continue. But in any event, thanks to Roger for getting us off to a great start, and to Nathan Gilmour, Michial Farmer, and the rest of the Christian Humanists for hosting my podcast!
