While Bethel doesn’t actually start its break until Wednesday, I plan to take the entire week off from blogging. In the meantime, let me suggest some alternate reading material:
• Tracy McKenzie’s Thanksgiving countdown: “As an alternative to the ubiquitous countdown to Black Friday, each weekday this month I have been posting brief essays on the history of the First Thanksgiving and its place in American memory.” Given that Tracy is the author of The First Thanksgiving, I can’t think of a better series to read this week. Today he started a final set of posts, suggesting “some positive lessons we might learn from a more accurate encounter with the Pilgrims’ story.”
• Hopefully, Tracy will soon review the new Pilgrims miniseries on the National Geographic Channel. Its star, former Mad Man Vincent Kartheiser, told his hometown newspaper that “The idea that you would die rather than go against the word of God is foreign to my own personal experience, and I didn’t want to bring in my own religious beliefs, which are quite different. I think you just have to imagine this sense of commitment as a small ball of twine and keep wrapping yourself around it until it gets larger and larger in your psyche.”
• For a more theological reflection on Thanksgiving and giving thanks, see this morning’s post from Roger Olson. For example: “I thank God for my colleagues and the wonderful shared Christian community that we enjoy. I am certain there is no institution of higher education with such a sense of Christian fellowship and community and so free of competition. I thank God for raising it up and bringing me into it. And I thank God for my students.”
• And I’ll plan again to do some microblogging at the Pietist Schoolman Facebook page, and perhaps to tweet more often than usual. (I practiced last night during the American Music Awards, for which I was profoundly unthankful.)
I’ll try to be much less snarky the rest of the week.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
The Pietist Schoolman 