Consider the birds of the sky, that they do not sow or reap or gather produce into barns, and your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth more than they are? (Matt 6:26, Lexham English Bible) When I was in grad school, my advisor occasionally invited us to go birdwatching with him. While I … More What Christians Can Learn from Birdwatching
In part because it only happens twice a year, but mostly because I appreciate its aims and quality, the arrival of the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of the newsletter Pietisten made for a good start to finals week. As always, there’s a lot of diverse content to savor in this issue, let me just note a … More In the Fall/Winter 2013 Issue of Pietisten…
What follows is as good a summation of what we do in Christian higher education as I know. It’s courtesy of my friend and frequent collaborator Sam Mulberry. Background: yesterday morning we held our semester-ending “synthesizing dialogue” with 140 students in Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class. It was my twentieth such conclusion, which still … More “Wounded and Healed”: A Benediction for Fall 2013 (Sam Mulberry)
About six months ago I explored the question, “How Well Paid Are Christian College Faculty?“, and found that “even the best of the evangelical college set can struggle to keep up with their self-defined peers” when it comes to paying professors. Is the same true of our bosses? On Sunday the Chronicle of Higher Education … More How Well Paid Are Christian College Presidents?
Last Thursday morning in the Bethel University Library, philosopher David Williams (Azusa Pacific University) returned to his alma mater to give the seventh and final talk in a series previewing chapters from Whole and Holy Persons: A Pietist Approach to Christian Higher Education (forthcoming in late 2014 from InterVarsity Press). In “The Pietist Impulse and … More Watch the Entire Series of Talks Previewing Our Book on Pietism and Higher Education
Here… • Playing Santa for someone who loves to read about history? A few gift suggestions… • Then one more (if that someone is interested in the Jesus People, or just likes well-written religious history). • Choral music, corporate confession, and comfort with paradox… Why I’m almost a Lutheran. • And I celebrated Human Rights … More That Was The Week That Was
12/13/13 – Not long after I posted yesterday’s sampling of histories and biographies that made the cut on leading “Best of 2013” lists, Christianity Today named God’s Forever Family, Larry Eskridge’s history of the Jesus People movement, its inaugural “Book of the Year.” (Eskridge also won the History/Biography category in CT’s Book Awards.) So that’s … More One More “Best of 2013” Book
Is two years too soon to call something an “annual holiday tradition”? For our readers who like to give such gifts for Christmas, here’s a list of some of the history books to have appeared on the “Best of 2013” lists that I first examined in a recent post on academic historians achieving success with … More The Best History Books of 2013?
Track this and tell me that God doesn’t work in mysterious ways: 1. When I was hired to come to a Baptist/Pietist/evangelical college as the new European historian, I was expected to teach an upper-level course on the Reformations. The last time I had studied this chapter in history was… oh, the first week of … More Why I’m Almost a Lutheran
Sixty-five years ago yesterday, the United Nations General Assembly gathered in Paris’ Palais de Chaillot to approve the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Australia’s Herbert Evatt, presiding over the General Assembly, called the moment “an epoch-making event in the development of international law” and enthused that the UN was … More This Day in History: The Birth of Human Rights Law
The Pietist Schoolman 