Here • I liked Lauren Winner’s use of a pie social as a metaphor for the Church, though I Midwestern-ized it into a potluck supper. • Trying hard not to pile on Penn State after the NCAA sanctions that were announced Monday, I tried to make the case for sports playing an integral role in … More That Was The Week That Was
As an Olympics junkie, I was pretty thrilled to see this interactive feature from Slate making the rounds yesterday. For the men’s and women’s competitions in four Olympic events (100m dash, discus, long jump, 100m freestyle swim) it lines up eight gold medalists going back through time and animates their performances. So, for example, you … More Olympic Records Over Time
Today: a second reflection inspired by Lauren Winner’s Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Read the first here. As you might guess from the title, Lauren Winner spends plenty of time alone with her thoughts in Still, but it doesn’t usually take more than a page or two before a relative or friend or pastor … More Reflections on Lauren Winner’s Still: The Potluck Church
With the Summer Olympics about to start, there’s been some attention paid to the last Olympiad hosted by London: the 1948 summer games, which took place in a country still subject to rationing and other austerity measures, experiencing the beginning of the end of history’s greatest empire, and nervously watching Cold War tensions heat up … More Mussolini’s World’s Fair
Only two posts ago in this series, I said that I owned only two 1980s albums that were popular: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. and Tom Petty’s solo album, Full Moon Fever. Oh, and one of the 25+ million copies of The Joshua Tree that have been sold worldwide. U2, The Joshua Tree How’d … More Albums A to Z: The Joshua Tree
In January 1998 Penn State University head football coach Joe Paterno and his wife Sue gave the school $3.5 million to endow faculty positions, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate scholarships, mostly in the College of Liberal Arts. Gushed Penn State president Graham Spanier, “I’m the luckiest University president in the United States.” When retired historian Michael … More A Grand Experiment: Why Sports Belong in Higher Education
The ten most popular posts in the last month here at The Pietist Schoolman: In Celebration of Students Tolkien, Lewis, and the Memory of War Why Are There No Holidays in August? [I have no idea why an August 2011 post got so much attention in June-July 2012…] Roger Olson on Pietism and Postmodernism The … More The Big Ten
Here • The 70th anniversary of a dark day in French history, when French police helped their German occupiers to round up 13,000 Jewish women, men, and children, cram them into a bicycling arena without sanitation, and eventually send them to their deaths in Auschwitz. • The summer’s half over, but there’s still time for … More That Was The Week That Was
“Can liberal Christianity be saved?“, asked New York Times columnist Ross Douthat a few days ago. He was virtually certain that the answer was No, based on what he saw as the fifty-year decline of denominations like The Episcopal Church (TEC). The conservative Catholic Douthat’s thesis was echoed by at least two commentators with connections to Episcopalianism: … More “The ones that should go”: One Liberal Protestant Explanation for Mainline Decline
Courtesy of three of my colleagues at Bethel University’s Department of History… We’ve been taking turns posting our summer reading lists at the department blog, AC 2nd. I’ve already posted my list on this blog as well; now here are a few of the titles listed by my more widely-read colleagues G.W. Carlson (GWC), AnneMarie … More Some (Mid)Summer Reading Suggestions
The Pietist Schoolman 