2018: That Was The Year That Was

As I look back over the last year — not just here at Pietist Schoolman, but in my posts at The Anxious Bench, various talks and sermons, and other projects — three themes clearly stand out:

The Pietist Option in Practice

In some ways, it felt like publishing my book with Mark Pattie last October would conclude my decade-long work on finding a “usable past” for Pietism. I do think that my ongoing research into the spiritual life of Charles Lindbergh will reduce the time I give to researching and writing about Pietism. But I still found myself thinking out loud about that subject: from blogging on the history of 19th and 20th century Scandinavian revivalists who affirmed women in ministry, to organizing a Pietist Option devotional for Lent written by our readers, to the ongoing task of working out our “Pietist option” in practice.

First Congregational Church of Litchfield, Connecticut

Above all, the book gave me the chance to preach and/or teach in several churches this year, from a venerable Congregationalist assembly in Connecticut to a group of Lutherans in suburban Minnesota. It was good to talk about Pietism in real life with so many different Christians, but two of these speaking engagements were especially meaningful: getting to teach a four-week “Pietist Option for Baptists” class in the church where my late friend and mentor G.W. Carlson served for many years; and preaching on the common priesthood in Mark’s pulpit at Salem Covenant Church.

Of course, one of the most important events of the year for our family was that we decided to leave Salem this fall and move to my wife’s home denomination: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. But even as I learn to be an evangelical in the mainline, it’s still clear that I’ll never stop being a Covenanter.

(Indeed, I hope to have a couple of teaching opportunities in Covenant contexts next summer and fall. Stay tuned.)

The Crisis of the Christian Liberal Arts

This is also familiar ground for readers of mine, but I felt the crisis of the Christian liberal arts even more keenly this year because my tenure as vice-president and now president of our faculty happened to coincide with a budget crisis at Bethel. That’s no doubt why I took so seriously the decision by a neighboring school to slash history and other humanities and social science disciplines — and why I could write an open letter to an unknown billionaire with hat in hand and tongue only partly in cheek. Then having to contribute to the decisions to cut programs this fall left me wondering if Friedrich Nietzsche was right that “he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

Still, I ended the year feeling mildly hopeful that our department was doing better than some of its peers — in part because an idea that I first started developing five years ago is starting to bear fruit. And I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful, day in and day out, to spend time in the classroom, whether teaching business, physics, and computer science majors about the Cold War or learning to appreciate the Middle Ages through the eyes of a future nurse.

The First World War, 100 Years Later

For that matter, no one who is mere days away from spending three weeks in Europe should complain too loudly about his job. I spent much of the fall preparing for next month’s fourth iteration of our J-term travel course on World War I… while simultaneously planning a shorter, sunnier world wars trip for adults next June.

And in this 100th year of the Armistice that ended fighting on the Western Front, I thought I should take every opportunity to try to convince American audiences of the importance of the Great War. I played a small role on our state’s WWI centennial commission, got to talk about the war with opera lovers, and tried to connect it to everything from Christ the King Sunday to a much-loved Christmas worship service.

Oh, and for the record, I did go see Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary again this week. I wanted my father-in-law to see a film that reminded me of what’s magical about studying the past.

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Thanks to all who read, listened, shared, and found ways to encourage me through a dismaying, frustrating, tiring, and yet still joyful year.

The Pietist Schoolman

The website and blog of historian Chris Gehrz