That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

This week I looked back at a debate over women in Bethel’s denomination, collaborated on a post about the faith of Walter Mondale, and shared some very positive early endorsements of my Charles Lindbergh biography. Elsewhere:

• Especially as a Minnesotan, I was relieved to see justice done in the Derek Chauvin trial. But as Elizabeth Bruenig pointed out, the question of what comes next isn’t an easy one.

Licensed by Creative Commons (Chad Davis)

• What’s the problem with a historically black university eliminating its Classics program? Ask Cornel West.

• The British agency in charge of maintaining war graves reported on its historic failure to recognize the African and Asian troops who served in World War I.

• Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to officially recognize the slaughter of Armenians during WWI as a genocide.

• Why did the Biden Administration rethink its refusal to increase the number of refugees it would accept? Give some credit to evangelical activists.

• If you want to spent an hour or two thinking about the future of evangelicalism, try this set of essays hosted by Georgetown University.

• Dan Williams looked back to a time in American politics when religious liberty was a liberal cause.

• One more reminder that I need to see Minari, the acclaimed new movie about churchgoing Korean American immigrants in 1980s Arkansas.

• For the better part of a decade now, our church giving has been almost entirely electronic. Could COVID make the collection plate even less relevant?

• In case you’ve ever wondered what it would look like to render one of Pablo Picasso’s greatest works in chocolate…

• Also in Spain: one of the most important voices speaking out against the COVID vaccine is a liberal nun from Catalonia.

• As always, Smithsonian Magazine tells fascinating origin stories: this week, of the Associated Press and a famous thesaurus.

• It’s often been observed that more people are reading under COVID. Karen Swallow Prior explained why this is really good news.

• Between the effects of a pandemic and a belated reckoning with a variety of ingrained problems, Greek life is in trouble on American college campuses.

• We’ve reached the point in higher ed where there are enough colleges closing to create a market for a book on that subject, written by the last leaders of one such school.

• Get to know one of America’s most distinctive Christian universities: Eastern, outside Philadelphia, has long been a kind of “laboratory” for the evangelical left.

• Add another name to the list of Christian college presidents trained as historians.

Seattle Pacific University – Creative Commons (Westlake78)

• The newest battleground in the fight over sexuality in Christian higher education: Seattle Pacific University.

• I missed this last Friday, but it’s well worth coming back to: Jonathan Wilson’s argument that even left-leaning professors are actually quite conservative in their teaching.

• Finally, I love McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich, but I’d never given any thought to its cross-cultural appeal.