That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

Greetings from the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan! After a terrific couple days at the Conference on Faith and History, I’m waiting for my flight home and thought I’d share a few of the pieces I’ve been reading the last seven days:

• With all that’s been going on at my own Christian college, I haven’t had the bandwidth to write about Azusa Pacific University — which changed its behavior standards for LBGT students… then changed them back again after a conservative outcry.

Laats, Fundamentalist U
Adam’s book on Christian higher education came out March 1st from Oxford University Press

• So why do such schools have a hard time changing? Adam Laats saw APU as repeating an old story in the history of evangelical higher education.

• I had the pleasure to sit with our opening speaker, Peggy Bendroth, at the CFH banquet last night. Not long ago she wrote about the unexpected benefits of institutional religion.

• Is the Republican Party at risk of losing the votes of a key constituency in the Age of Trump?

• Do we think of Christian Zionism as an interfaith movement?

• Hard to imagine a more timely Anxious Bench post than Kristin Du Mez considering what explains the apparent “unwillingness on the part of so many evangelical Christians to condemn abuse when it does occur.”

• For a very different view of masculinity than what Kristin studies… I looked more closely at how my favorite hymn writer wrote about God.

• The 501st anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses isn’t going to have the energy surrounding the 500th… so now what? “So now,” wrote the woman who heads the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States, “we live, really live, in freedom and in service.”

Soldiers and Sailors Monument in St. Paul, MN
The Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in front of the Cathedral of St. Paul — CC BY-NC 4.0 (Chris Gehrz)

• Debates over Civil War memorials aren’t confined to the former Confederacy: a statue of a Civil War veteran in St. Paul, Minnesota is drawing criticism from Native American activists.

• Did you hear? I’m taking a group of adults to Europe next June for an eleven-day world wars tour.

• It’s no easy thing to be a college student these days. Now imagine doing it with kids…

• This week I submitted a proposal for a new course on the history and politics of sports. Which will make it all the easier for me to justify spending time reading articles like this one on the history of baseball cards.