Yesterday Mark, Sam, and I recorded the penultimate episode of this season of The Pietist Schoolman Podcast, on preaching, listening, and (somehow) Donald Trump. It’ll go up on Thursday, but in the meantime I want to go ahead and start soliciting comments for our season finale, which we’ll record next Monday.
If you’ve been listening, you know that Mark and I are using these podcasts as a way to think through the book we’ll be writing this summer and fall, entitled Hope for Better Times: Pietism and the Future of Christianity. We hoped not only to start building an audience for the book, but to get some feedback from future readers even before writing begins in earnest.
To this point, we’ve had plenty of listeners — but not a whole lot of responses. So we’re planning for our finale to serve as a last chance for you all to share your opinion. We’ll have a few closing thoughts of our own, but primarily, we want to share listener feedback!
So whether you’ve listened to the entire season or just an episode here or there, please take a couple minutes to respond to one or more of the following questions:
- What’s been your chief takeaway from this season?
- What aspect of the Pietist ethos most strongly resonates with you?
- Which tension inherent to Pietism worries you the most?
- Which of our six “proposals” seems most promising?
- What have we missed?
You can leave comments here, at our Facebook page, or by emailing me. We’re happy to name you or leave the comment anonymous, as you prefer. Just make sure you respond by Monday morning so that we have time to incorporate your comments into our afternoon recording session.
Looking forward to hearing what you think!
Cross-posted at The Christian Humanist
The Pietist Schoolman 
I’ve been listening for a while but never written in because I feel so out of my depth. Pietism has always been academic for me; I’ve never known – or even heard of – practicing Pietists or Anabaptists. Then again, raised in primarily Independent Fundamental Baptist circles, my mentors had little motive to teach me about other denominations. In fact, I was raised to view other denominations with suspicion. Thankfully, that has changed over the past twelve years, and I find myself personally embracing bits and pieces of other Christian faiths (if that is the best word for them).
Your podcast has helped me think more deeply about what it means to live a deliberate, Christ-centered life and reconcile the seeming contradictions inherent in living in the world and not being of the world.
I became acquainted with the podcast through the Christian Humanist Podcast, and am ever grateful for your German pronunciation.
FWIW, last year I set a personal goal of guest-hosting every CHP podcast. Unrealistic, I know, especially since there’s nothing I can really add to Pietist Schoolman (or Book of Nature, for that matter) due to my own ignorance of the issues at hand.
The best I can say is: keep up the good work. Cliche, I know, but there are some sponges our here in podcast land absorbing everything you say. If it’s because we don’t speak up, it’s because – for some of us – that’s like being called to the front of the class to explain something we “taught” ourselves on the way to school that morning.
Thanks for listening and writing, Jay! I’m happy to have people absorb — just wanted to give folks one last chance to speak their piece before we go on hiatus.