That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

I blogged about Harry Potter and history and podcast about the reading list for our new sports history course. Elsewhere…

Bowler, The Preacher's Wife• Next up on my personal reading list is Kate Bowler’s The Preacher’s Wife. One finding she previewed for New York Times readers: “…conservative women gain considerable influence without institutional power, and liberal women gain institutional power without considerable influence.”

• After that, I’ll move on to James K. A. Smith’s much-anticipated book on Augustine. The Christian Century published an excerpt dealing with one of the central problems in that theologian’s life.

• If you’re not on Twitter, you might not realize that there was a big debate among evangelicals over David’s treatment of Bathsheba.

• What if the Apostle Paul were around to write an epistle to the church in America?

• For the second year in a row, the Nobel Peace Prize went to a Pentecostal Christian from Africa. (Stop by The Anxious Bench on Tuesday for a post inspired by the story of Abiy Ahmed.)

• Meet one of the most interesting athletes in the world: an Australian rugby star whose political activism was partly inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

• I doubt that Donald Trump’s appalling treatment of Kurdish allies will loose him many rank-and-file voters, but because of implications for religious liberty, it might hurt his standing with some leading evangelicals.

• Oh, and yes: the impeachment inquiry against Trump should move forward. Just ask 17 of the people who worked on Watergate.

• Should Christians cultivate influence among the (politically or culturally) powerful?

• It was quite the week to start talking about German anti-Semitism in my modern European history course… A far right political party again appropriated the image and words of Martin Luther, and a gunman tried to slaughter Jews during Yom Kippur (in a historic center of Pietism).

• I’ll circle back to Beto O’Rourke’s comments on revoking tax exemptions for non-LGBT affirming churches and religious organizations, but Adam Laats thought that Christian college folks should pay attention to what might be a greater threat in the long run: an executive order by Pres. Trump.

• In my address at Point Loma Nazarene last week, I considered how Christian colleges participate in God’s “economy of grace.” For a much fuller development of that theme, see Dan Grubbs’ latest for Front Porch Republic.