That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

This’ll be my last post for a while, as we enjoy a family reunion and wedding. Meanwhile, enjoy these posts you might have missed during the past week:

Here…

• There’s a spiritual side to The Spirit of St. Louis (the Lindbergh memoir that is… and the Billy Wilder film adaptation of it).

• I’m still working on an “elevator speech” version of the Pietist option. But one way or another, know that it’s not a quick fix.

…There and Everywhere

• Speaking of things not given to quick fixes… The reason I wrote so little here is that I spent a lot of time polishing an Anxious Bench essay on Christian colleges and sexuality, responding to critiques by Carl Trueman and Rod Dreher.

• Dreher was kind enough to reprint parts of my piece in a dismissive response at The American Conservative. I’d link back, but I can save you the time: he thinks I’m throwing up my hands up in surrender.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th370QmFtk8

(Thanks to Scot McKnight for suggesting that his Jesus Creed readers consider the Pietist option as an alternative to Dreher’s own much-discussed option.)

• In related news… Jamie Smith wondered if it’s appropriate to use sexuality and marriage as markers of small-o orthodoxy. (For a thoughtful critique of Smith, head over to Derek Rishmawy’s blog.)

• Does the next wave in evolutionary biology point “to a more holistic system than scientists have traditionally seen, one more open to some divine inspiration for life”?

• Bob Smietana shared a fascinating interview with two scholars of independent network Christianity.

• Does the decline of small town businesses and suburban malls have any implications for churches?

Dying mall
Dying mall in Maryland – Creative Commons (goblinbox)

• Same question, subbing laundromats for malls and colleges for churches.

• Once more with feeling: why having strong public colleges and universities is valuable, even for their private competitors.

• Did you know that first-generation college students are the most likely to major in the humanities or social sciences? (I didn’t.)

• It’s been a quarter-century now since one of my favorite bands released an album that both “embodies a broader, more spacious Midwest” and “a Midwest as surveyed by an Old Testament prophet dispensing curses and blessings…”