The Pietist Schoolman

Here…

• Greetings from the East Coast! While I’m out here doing research, I’ll also be preaching or teaching at several churches.

• A visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum (and reading his daughter’s memoir) made me wonder again about Charles Lindbergh’s views on Jewish people.

…There and Everywhere

• Being in DC also gave me the chance to reconnect with four Bethel alumni, who provided yet more evidence of the value of majors like History and Political Science.

• Those former students were working politics, government, and law. But history and the other humanities are also good preparation for… medicine.

• Kristin Du Mez and I each wondered about the future of Patheos.

• But as long as David Swartz can write about elves in Iceland, I feel good about the future of The Anxious Bench.

• “On climate change, Black Lives Matter, and immigration,” pointed out Sarah Jones, “non-white evangelicals have little in common with their white brothers and sisters in Christ.”

• And Molly Worthen suspected that there’s generational change coming to evangelicalism — just look at their college campuses.

• Meanwhile, Dale Coulter urged evangelicals to reclaim their older affirmation of women in ministry: “It is time to leave ‘masculine’ evangelicalism behind and reclaim what was the evangelical center in the nineteenth century. This does not require complementarians to violate their consciences with respect to the Word of God. Rather, it entails recovering the role of women as teachers, preachers, and deacons who serve the whole church (not simply women’s ministries).”

• Historians of evangelicalism spend a lot of time debating that term. Should historians of Catholicism do likewise?

• When the Southern Baptist Convention meets next week, Paige Patterson won’t be speaking — and the SBC will likely elect its youngest president in decades.

• This year’s National Spelling Bee ended with a good New Testament word.

• Do Americans need to reclaim a sense of honor?

• When we take students to Europe next January for our World War I travel course, we’ll end up in Bavaria, where almost all public buildings are now required to display a cross.

• But first, I’ll be teaching my Cold War class in the fall. Since it’s the first time I’ve offered that course in a few years, I’m looking for new sources — e.g., some newly declassified posters from the National Security Agency.

• Two Stanford professors want us to rethink a basic divide in higher education: “The humanities were not always aligned with useless contemplation, they argue, nor was modern science born pragmatic.”

• Elsewhere at Stanford: historian Niall Ferguson encouraged conservative students to gather “opposition research” on their left-wing peers.