The Pietist Schoolman

It’s too nice a summer day in Minnesota to stay inside for too long, but here’s a shortened version of TWTWTW:

Here…

• Year six of The Pietist Schoolman started with me revisiting a Baptist debate over religious freedom in the 1960s.

• I wasn’t a delegate this year, but my denomination’s annual meeting had me reading through the expanding, increasingly diverse roster of Evangelical Covenant writers.

• Much political commentary has focused on evangelical support or non-support for Donald Trump, but I wondered if perhaps Hillary Clinton could win the votes of more of those Christians.

• Still trying to gather my thoughts about Britain’s vote to leave the EU…

…There and Everywhere

• Of course, that’s assuming that Britain actually does leave the EU. Not everyone’s so sure it will.

• But that’s in the future… For now, the reflections on Brexit are still pouring forth. If you read just one, make it Timothy Garton Ash’s, which spans the complex range of emotions felt by a historian who, “as a lifelong English European,” experienced the vote as “the biggest defeat of my political life…. almost as bad a day as the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall was good.”

• Or, for balance: Alan Jacobs has spent the past couple days puncturing the more grandiose claims of aggrieved Remain-ers like theologian John Milbank.

• Meanwhile, back in the States… Today is the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. What does same-sex marriage look like in 2016?

• Big news in the evangelical blogosphere: Roger Olson is taking a hiatus from that mode of communications (for reasons that I often wrestle with myself).

• Donald Trump held a conference over 900 evangelical leaders. While it yielded an “advisory board” of twenty-five such figures, at least one participant came away unconvinced, with lots of unanswered questions.

• Oh, and one member of that advisory board, James Dobson, claimed that Donald Trump has been born-again… As first reported by friend-of-this-blog John Fea, back from vacation and already making news.

• Is it time for the pro-life version of the old Prohibitionist party? I’m not interested in something focused solely on abortion rights, but I’d give strong consideration to a “fiscally liberal and socially conservative” third party that embraces a “consistent life ethic.”