Beyond steering readers to Jay Phelan’s revived blog and reflecting on the “Baptist Pietist” legacy of G.W. Carlson, I enjoyed a quiet late summer week here at The Pietist Schoolman. Here’s some of what I read elsewhere:
• In light of President Trump’s latest attacks on the “unpatriotic” press, I’m even more sure of the conclusion to my Anxious Bench piece on Christian patriotism.
• Did high school history classes (or, at least, the textbooks used in them) help give rise to a “post-truth” society?
• We envision a rural-urban split in American politics, but perhaps the fissures are more subtle, demarcated by regions that are still defined by settlement patterns. (Minnesotans like me, for example, live in the extended left-leaning territory of “Yankeedom.”)
• The dream of a third party alternative dies hard…
• Another Benedict Option? Theologian Stephen Pardue took a second look at Rod Dreher’s much-debated proposal and decided that “missing throughout this discussion has been serious consideration of the virtue that Saint Benedict highlighted most prominently in his Rule: humility.”
• It’s not often that a change to the Catholic catechism is headline news.
• Perhaps the most famous Lutheran pastor in America has left the church she founded in order to work full-time as a “public theologian.”
• According to Philip Jenkins, something revolutionary happened in December 1968 that would have profound impact on religion: not American astronauts orbiting the moon, but a computer engineer giving “The Mother of All Demos” in San Francisco.
• The problem of “poverty tourism” in countries like Kenya: “Think of the vice versa,” [Nairobi resident Sylestine Awino] says, ‘What would happen to an African like me in Europe or America, touring and taking photos of their poor citizens?'”
• A 1941 memo came to light suggesting that Emperor Hirohito was more supportive of the Pearl Harbor attack than previously thought.
• Another huge gift for a philosophy department at a research university.
• Has a conservative college’s connections to Republican politics in the Age of Trump put its mission in jeopardy? Students, alumni, and others at Hillsdale College responded to a provocative column by Conor Friedersdorf.
• A California doctor went inside the “wellness-industrial complex,” which, she says, “seeks to resurrect” the ancient connection between medicine and religion.
• Infographics of the week: Bloomberg’s visualization of how American land is used.
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