This week I shared a Lenten devotional that I created with colleagues on the Bethel faculty — one that made me think of former Bethel president George Brushaber, whose memorial service was last Sunday — and I took my turn to write the lead essay in our Following Jesus conversation, “A Week in the Life of a Pietist.” Elsewhere:
• I don’t know that David Brooks is right about the global response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but I hope he is.
• On the other hand, the Cold War historian in me worries that Mary Sarotte — also writing in the New York Times — is right to fear “that Russia’s invasion, regardless of its outcome, portends a new era of immense hostility with Moscow — and that this new cold war will be far worse than the first.”
• Among its many other effects, that invasion has also revealed significant tensions within the world of Eastern Orthodoxy.
• And it’s certainly given me some current events topics to discuss in our spring course on the History and Politics of Sports.
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• Finally, if 2022 wasn’t already doing enough to evoke 1939: the BBC is reviving its tradition of using shortwave radio transmissions to get news to occupied Europeans.
• Meanwhile, back on these shores… what’s in more trouble: organized religion or major league baseball?
• Could churches spark a revival in congregational singing?
• At least for this term, the Supreme Court is not going to review the question of whether Christian college professors like me qualify for the “ministerial exception.”
• Later this month we’ll be releasing a new podcast about college admissions. Someone else beat me to one of my first pieces of advice: ignore Harvard and other elite institutions.
• Could the advent of the metaverse help solve some problems in higher ed? (I hope those problems are solved… but not in this way.)
• Satire of the week: how undergraduate teaching evaluations of the Son of God might have read.
The Pietist Schoolman 