That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

Here at The Pietist Schoolman, Sam Mulberry and I talked about visiting the former Western Front, and Tony Minnema thought out loud about doing the Christian liberal arts in a work college setting. Elsewhere…

• I thought I knew a lot about WWI commemoration, but I hadn’t actually heard the story behind the origins of the moment of silence observed on Remembrance Day.

Poppy wreaths in front of the Cenotaph
100 years after the Armistice… poppy wreaths in front of London’s Cenotaph – Creative Commons (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport)

• What Michael Beschloss has learned about presidents in wartime. (#1 – they’ve generally become more religious.)

• W.E.B. DuBois: infographics pioneer.

• Good to see a liberal writer as significant Peter Beinart making the case for civil disobedience, and against fighting alt-right fire with antifa fire.

• L.D. Burnett wrestled with the place of deeply held religious beliefs in a field like intellectual history.

• Beth Allison Barr continued to fight the good fight against culturally captive notions of “biblical manhood and womanhood.”

• I try to turn off the academic when I go to church, but I can’t help it… I shared with Anxious Bench readers some early impressions of the Lutheran church we’re now attending. (TL;DR = the mainline’s not as different from evangelicalism as I’d have expected.)

• Jay Phelan warned how Christian “movements full of life and Spirit are fenced in by the purse lipped devotees of ‘law and order.'”

• On several counts, younger evangelicals resemble older ones.

• Some National Pastime reading for the long, cold offseason: why “baseball’s single most important quality—and the one that will make it forever resistant to globalization—is its abundance.”

• The percentage of American college students studying abroad continues to grow… and become more diverse.

• You may recall that plans to cut liberal arts majors at a University of Wisconsin campus inspired me to warn Christian colleges against following “the Stevens Point pathway.” In the end, UWSP did save some of those programs — but not history.

• I guess I knew there must be something somewhere that defines a unit of measure like a kilogram… I just didn’t know it was (but is no longer) a “sleek cylinder of platinum-iridium metal” living underneath the city of Paris.