This past fall I stepped away from The Pietist Schoolman as part of an effort to focus on research and writing that also took me on a sabbatical from Grace College to the Young Center for Pietist and Anabaptist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. (Here’s our interview with Jared about that sabbatical.) I took my … More Thanks for holding my place, Chris!
For longer than I want to admit, Mark Norris, my colleague in the History Department at Grace College, and I have been working to pull together an edited volume on the history of our institution. We know that institutional histories don’t often represent the best in critical scholarship and are often assumed to be merely … More Examining Institutional Memory
In many Christian circles, secular colleges and universities can sometimes get a bad rap. Parents are warned that their children will “lose their faith” in these environments and that professors will intentionally undermine their beliefs. Politically conservative Christians routinely express their belief that American colleges and universities are out to brainwash their kids with leftist … More Should Christian Higher Education Be “Safe”?
For fundamentalist-leaning evangelicals, biblical inerrancy carries a ton of freight. It remains something of a shibboleth that 1) Provides a litmus test of orthodoxy, 2) verifies that one actually takes the Bible at face value, and 3) leads one to appropriate positions on issues ranging from origins to eschatology. With so much riding on this one … More Inerrancy and the “Lost World of Scripture”: An Interview with D. Brent Sandy
Attention to David Barton’s treatment of Thomas Jefferson has died down since the controversy that led to Thomas Nelson rescinding their endorsement of The Jefferson Lies back in 2012. But Barton remains active and his popularity among the evangelical right’s rank and file has rebounded. Barton’s continued popularity, it seems to me, raises several issues … More Should Christian Scholars be Watchdogs? An Interview with David Barton Critic Warren Throckmorton
The first time I heard about Winona Lake in northeast Indiana was during my research for my Masters thesis at TEDS. My project was a study of two Mennonite congregations in eastern Pennsylvania that were heavily influenced by American evangelicalism during the 1950s. The pastor of one of these congregations, an evangelist named John S. … More Introducing the Winona History Center at Grace College
For those of us who are children of the 1980s, mention of the Prosperity Gospel conjures up images of fallen televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker or Protestant outlanders such as Benny Hinn. But in recent years, more marketable versions of health and wealth Christianity have been mainstreamed by preachers from Joyce Meyer to … More The Prosperity Gospel and Historical Legitimacy
Generally speaking, academic historians and public historians approach the past from two different vantage points. For historians, a productive career has traditionally revolved around producing monographs and engaging with other professional historians on the fine points of interpretation, theory, and effective arguments. Public historians, on the other hand, do their work with a different audience … More Historical Schizophrenia: Academic and Public History
I recently had the opportunity to hear Tim Challies speak at one of our local churches here in Winona Lake, IN. Challies is a (Neo-Calvinist) pastor, writer, and a keen thinker who has helped his audiences wrestle with issues related to faith, technology, and our ubiquitous digital devices. Many of Challies’ points were what one … More Technology and Faith: A Perennial Dilemma
J. D. Woods, a professor in the Art Department here at Grace and an acoustic musician, is one my favorite colleagues and he often gets asked to perform with his guitar or banjo. I can easily see Pete Seeger’s influence on his life. Yesterday morning, I found the following note from him in my inbox: … More A Colleague Remembers Pete Seeger
The Pietist Schoolman 