Here…
• With all due respect to the good work my colleagues do at Bethel… I think America probably has enough business majors. (As I addressed the issue of how students choose their major, I should have linked to this recent survey from Gallup.)
• “Nothing Rhymes with Gehrz” made its triumphant return to whatever is the podcasting equivalent of the airwaves.
• And I explained why we dedicated The Pietist Option to two men all but unknown outside of the Evangelical Covenant Church.
…There and Everywhere
• I just don’t know what else can be said about Donald Trump at this point. And then he starts tweeting about Puerto Rico… Go ahead, supporters, explain to us again why he’s fit to be president.
(And no, he’s not being clever.)
• You might expect that football fans would tend to be conservative, but this far into the Trump administration only six NFL teams’ fan bases lean Republican.
• The latest to join the fray over protests during the National Anthem… A Christian college in Arkansas whose program includes “patriotic education.”
• Speaking of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: did you know that its author was an Episcopalian lay leader and hymn writer, or that several Christians in the 20th century protested its status as national anthem?
• I’ve written critically about Christian participation in civil religion. But one can make the case that it serves as “the moral backbone of our body politic.”
• The country’s first Muslim liberal arts college bought a new campus: the former grounds of Pacific Lutheran Seminary.
• If you want to read highlights and reflections from the recent conference on “the evangelical mind,” check out John Fea’s and John Hawthorne’s blogs.
• A David Brooks column comparing Chance the Rapper to Taylor Swift sounds like a terrible idea… but I basically think he’s right.
• Fortunately, our kids never got into Thomas the Tank Engine all that much… otherwise they might have assimilated the values of a “premodern corporate-totalitarian dystopia.”
The Pietist Schoolman 