I considered the similarities between professional hockey and evangelical Christianity, and encouraged my home denomination to cling to its distinctive heritage in Pietism. Elsewhere:
• U.S. historians are debating a new article alleging sexual misconduct by Martin Luther King, Jr., on the basis of documents from the FBI agents who spied on him.
• One of the problems of moving offices is that almost all my books are temporarily in storage — including Confederates in the Attic, which I’d badly like to reread in the wake of its author’s untimely death. As Robert Greene pointed out, Tony Horwitz “never seemed to feel any trepidation about writing and working as both a journalist and a historian.”
• For Memorial Day Weekend, the U.S. Army asked soldiers to tweet how serving had affected them. The answers were complicated.
• Visiting the World War I museum in Kansas City, one Christian college history professor was struck by the importance of propaganda posters.
• As I prepare to return to Omaha Beach next week, I can confirm that this is true.
• The FiveThirtyEight considered why America’s religious left was unlikely to achieve anything like the influence of the religious right.
• If Michael Wear is right that “Abortion politics in 2019 is a morality play about what happens when one side has all the political power, yet feels culturally embattled,” then perhaps Charlie Camosy is right that “We need brand-new ways of thinking and speaking about abortion.”
• At one point in my hockey post, I contrasted evangelicalism in Canada and the United States. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that 9,000 churches and other faith-related buildings north of that border will close in the next ten years.
• Mark Silk explained why the Pacific Northwest — the “None Zone” spanning Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia — “seems like a forerunner, a regional laboratory of demography indicating where North America north of the Mexican border is headed when it comes to religion.”
• Meanwhile, Philip Jenkins surveyed sources of religious revival in his increasingly secular homeland.
• I love integrating food into history courses, but this kind of archeology might not fly at Bethel…
• If only we had this enrollment problem…
• Is the future of higher education a combination of “serious scholastic study with sustained instruction in a trade or practical skill”?
The Pietist Schoolman 