The Pietist Schoolman

This week I encouraged fellow scholars to “think in public,” reflected on why trust is so important to Christian higher education, and recorded a new podcast on the experience of student-athletes. Elsewhere…

• I happened to be flying through Charlotte, North Carolina last week, and saw a big ad for the Billy Graham Library in the airport. “Wait a minute,” I thought to myself. “I thought that Billy Graham’s papers were at Wheaton College…”

• Like Tish Harrison Warren, “I am wary of referring to myself as simply a ‘Jesus follower’ because no one follows Jesus in some pure, individual way, free of institutional ties or traditions.”

• Of all the unlikely early contenders for the Democratic nomination, no one’s as unlikely as Pete Buttigieg. But it’s easy to see why there’s interest in an articulate, energetic young mayor who speaks freely of his Christian faith and his identity as a gay man.

• Congressional Democrats have introduced a bill that would expand federal nondiscrimination protections to LGBTQ Americans — without exemptions for religious organizations.

• Is Rod Dreher right to suggest an analogy between what it would take to address climate change and what it took to end slavery?

• “The internet has accelerated our experience of time,” wrote David Brooks, “and Donald Trump has upped the pace of events to permanent frenetic.”

• In praise of one of my favorite institutions: “A public library is predicated on an ethos of sharing and egalitarianism. It is nonjudgmental. It stands in stark opposition to the materialism and individualism that otherwise define our culture. It is defiantly, proudly, communal.”

• Some prominent Australians don’t want the country’s World War I memorial expanded.

• I can’t remember the last time so many social media-using historians shared an op-ed in Forbes…

• I’d missed the controversy at Westmont College involving a “stained glass window featuring a Jesus who is light-skinned with Anglo-Saxon facial features, and who is standing on what appears to be North America.”

• It’s a bad day for the liberal arts when a Jesuit university eliminates all but its professional programs… especially coming the same month that the Trump Administration embraced the movement to judge colleges by earnings data.