The Pietist Schoolman

Here…

• A year after his memorial service, a few of his many friends paid tribute to GW Carlson.

• Two short devotionals: on the importance of encouragement in Christian communities, and thoughts on Ash Wednesday.

• King of All Media alert: I made a temporary return to iTunes, and video of my lecture on Pietism and evangelicalism started streaming online.

• And The Atlantic reported on a Christian college… and did pretty well by it.

…There and Everywhere

• “Post-factuality is pre-fascism.” If you don’t believe me, take it from one of the leading historians of the Holocaust.

• Apropos of nothing: check out what happened to a leading French historian (who, coincidentally, wrote the book on his nation’s memory of collaboration with fascism).

• We’ve all heard of the “alt-right” by now. Meet the “alt-left.”

• But maybe we ought to give up Trump for Lent… or fear.

• And maybe the current president actually “has been good — indirectly — for a free press, an independent judiciary, high school civics, grass-roots political activity, cautionary tales in literature and theater, and spirituality.”

• Something more encouraging: a joint op-ed by an evangelical college president and a gay legislator whose friendship emerged from heated political debate.

• On the other hand: the president of a different Christian college was indicted by a federal grand jury.

• Another college president argued that those of us in higher ed “should acknowledge that many Americans believe the same thing [as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos]: that higher education is indoctrination in the dogmas of liberalism…. We should ask why this perception exists, whether we have unwittingly contributed to the perception and what we can do to change it.”

• “We are, in 2017, still waging the battles of the nineteenth century”: a long, but worthwhile reflection on Yale’s change of heart re: a residential college being named for slavery’s most prominent advocate.

• A new study by a Stanford economist finds that online education doesn’t actually save students or taxpayers much money.

• Just how effective are petitions and open letters signed by thousands of academics?

• I just stumbled across my doctoral dissertation for the first time in a while… Little did I know that I could have presented it as a 34-track rap album instead of a 300-page book.

• Over at The Anxious Bench… I learned about the history of temperance after Prohibition, and special guest Elesha Coffman re-introduced us to Margaret Mead, who was “a Christian, pro-life, and a feminist, but… typically remembered as none of these things.”

• News from global Christianity: the evangelical mayor of Rio de Janeiro decided to skip that city’s famous Carnival; and Ghana is the latest example of the growing influence of Christianity on African identity.