This week I paid tribute to my boss, reflected on Charles Lindbergh’s interest in primitive societies, and talked about college basketball and athletic labor. Elsewhere:
• David Brooks offered one of the rarest spectacles in 21st century American political discourse: a pundit who was convinced by others’ arguments to change his mind on a controversial topic.
• I was initially predisposed to pay little attention to the revelations about my state’s senior senator, but Caitlin Flanagan’s reflection on Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of her staff had me thinking again.
• I’m not a one-issue voter, but coming out in favor of my favorite science fiction universe certainly won’t hurt your chances with me.
• It’s time to start thinking about the semiquincentennial of the Revolutionary War.
• One of the places we’ll be headed on our June world wars tour is the Belgian city of Ieper (Ypres), which has been a destination for World War I tourists almost since the end of that war.
• A brief reminder that the original New Deal was also “green.”
• For Eboo Patel, the Jussie Smollett case pointed to the inherent limits of “identity politics.”
• Thanks to one of my state’s representatives in the U.S. Congress, we’re again wrestling with how to offer legitimate criticism of Israel without exacerbating the revived problem of anti-Semitism.
• The Catholic church “is not afraid of history,” said Pope Francis, explaining his decision finally to open secret Holocaust-era archives dealing with his controversial predecessor, Pius XII.
• Melissa Borja taught us about the variety of the Lenten diet for American Catholics: not just fish fries, but cheese pizza and muskrat feeds.
• My nine-year old son eats pretty much the same breakfast and (if brought from home) lunch every day. And he might be on to something with that sameness.
• Is the United Methodist Church about to experience its version of the Southern Baptists’ “Conservative Resurgence”? Nancy Ammerman shared some lessons from the recent past.
• What does it mean to be a Bible-believing Christian? Not necessarily hyper-literalism…
• It’s not every week that you see a post about Christian colleges at the blog of the Organization of American Historians. Thanks to Jesse Curtis for writing about the difficult history of African American students at institutions like Bethel.
• Former North Park campus pastor Judy Peterson, who lost her job after officiating at a same-sex wedding, told her story to a wider audience.
• I’ve only had one student in the past five years tell me that they took a gap year, but perhaps the phenomenon is growing.
The Pietist Schoolman 