That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

After a busy start to the New Year, I gave The Pietist Schoolman a week off and worked on syllabi for the spring semester. But elsewhere, I reviewed a new Winston Churchill biography for Christianity Today and convened a group of Anxious Bench contributors to suggest books that serve as important artifacts and analyses of Christianity in the Trump era.

And the end of that era seems like the right place to focus this weekend’s relatively brief collection of articles and posts I’ve been reading…

• No, I did not have Augustine on my Joe Biden Inaugural Address bingo card.

Wikimedia

• A day before she became a national celebrity, young poet Amanda Gorman told NPR she wasn’t sure “the entry point in which to step into the murk.”

• Meet the band teacher/National Guardsman who kept teaching his students when he wasn’t on duty protecting the Capitol this month.

• Millions of Americans still do not accept the fact that Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election; some of them even view the January 6th insurrection positively. How do we bring them back into the nation?

• Along with a flurry of other executive actions, Biden disbanded Donald Trump’s much-ridiculed 1776 Commission on American history. But Craig Bruce Smith suggested that replacing it with “a thorough, historian-led, nonpartisan commission on the founding isn’t such a bad idea.”

The last presidential site I visited was Woodrow Wilson’s (not officially part of the presidential library system, which started with Herbert Hoover) – Wikimedia

• Could Trump become the first president since Warren Harding (I think) not to have a presidential library?

• I missed this last week, but since it featured in this morning’s newsletter from David French… check out a Christian college dean’s apology for supporting Trump.

• Like John Turner, it’s become harder to recognize the evangelicalism that raised me, but I still think that it’s alive and well somewhere.

• Two other historians of evangelicalism weighed in: Kristin Du Mez warned Washington Post readers against believing five myths about that religious movement, while Thomas Kidd suggested three ways evangelicals might proceed in a post-Trump America.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

• Finally, one MLK piece in this week that Americans observe his birthday… I’m a pretty serious baseball fan, yet I had no idea that almost two dozen Hall of Famers came together in March 1970 to play an exhibition in King’s honor.