That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

I marked the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 by considering how people at the time made religious meaning of the Space Race, then shared my newest piece for Christianity Today and a map previewing the sites we’re considering for future Pietist Schoolman Travel tours. Elsewhere…

• L.D. Burnett on the moon landing as an epochal moment: “After thousands of years of human faith and longing, the things that were believed became the things that were seen.”

• At least at one point, I was a decently serious Space Race buff. But I knew almost nothing about Ed Dwight, the African American pilot who was kept from integrating the astronaut corps.

• What Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, A.W. Tozer, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and other leading Christian thinkers thought about the Space Race as it geared up in 1958.

• Is the next step in space to Mars? Would it come from just one more version of America’s sense of Manifest Destiny?

Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon – NASA/Smithsonian

• Planned Parenthood recently deposed its president, a physician who took to the pages of the New York Times to reveal that she was fired for being too moderate — including “our work to be inclusive of those with nuanced views about abortion.”

• Can Democrats win over the “religious middle“?

• Get the poignant story behind A Christian and a Democrat, the new FDR biography coming out from the same series that will publish my Lindbergh book.

• Christianity Today has a new publisher, and he thinks the Age of Trump calls for more “wilderness prophets” and fewer “court prophets.”

• It’s almost hard to remember there was a time before November 2016 when Donald Trump criticized evangelicals and his leading opponent couldn’t believe that devout Christians would support Trump.

• Is Trump destroying any hope for a multi-racial democracy and restoring America’s “old ethnic-chauvinist tradition”?

• As the history of school desegregation is being rehashed in the run-up to the 2020 election, Adam Laats reminds us that busing was effective, and embraced by whites, in some American cities.

• Historian (and former Harvard president) Drew Gilpin Faust reflected on her upbringing in segregated Virginia, a state that “has a long history to confront.”

Confederate cemetery in Virginia
Memorial Day 2012 at the Confederate Cemetery in Fredericksburg, VA – Creative Commons (Shannon Hauser)

• For Covenant readers… why one young pastor is so frustrated by the vote in Omaha.

• There’s new evidence that women served as priests in the Early Church.

• And the “Greatest Hymn of All Time” is…