That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

A couple days before Bethel announced its new president, I wrote about the risk of Christian colleges like ours closing. Elsewhere:

• Before Ash Wednesday fades too far into memory, let Mandy McMichael remind you of the powerful “oddity of prizing a day of great darkness, a day memorializing death.”

• I would like to say that I’m taking Jesuit journalist Thomas Reese’s advice and giving up Donald Trump for Lent, but…

• As in 2016, it seems like Christian college political science professors, though they lean Republican, are unlikely to vote for Donald Trump.

• Also from the increasingly indispensable Religion in Public blog: what education has to do with one crack emerging in the Trump-evangelical alliance.

• With an eye to the Southern Baptist Convention, David French warned that political correctness isn’t just a problem of the secular left.

• A lot of people have been reckoning with last weekend’s news about Jean Vanier, including pastoral care professor Chuck DeGroat: “Each of us is a complicated story of beauty and brokenness. We’re image-bearers brimming with dignity and also self-deceived, shame-laden saboteurs of trust.”

Hickel, William Wilberforce
Karl Anton Kickel, Portrait of William Wilberforce (1794)

• Speaking of complicated “heroes of the faith”… The author of a new book on addiction considered abolitionist William Wilberforce’s dependence on opium.

• David Swartz’s Anxious Bench post, “Burning Corsets at a Free Methodist Revival,” is about exactly what it sounds like. Which doesn’t make it any less surprising or interesting.

• Ever wondered what worship sounded like in the Hagia Sophia when it was still a Christian church?

• Filing this away for a future session of our Intro to History class: Matthew Teutsch on the nature of memory.

• Lots of museums, archives, and libraries are digitizing their collections, but the Smithsonian releasing nearly 3 million images onto a free, open access platform is still big news.