The other day Roger Olson asked (rhetorically) whether Christian organizations should adopt a business model. (Hint: the answer isn’t yes.) He was chiefly concerned with the two types of Christian organizations with which he (and I) mostly interact: colleges and churches. I’ll leave alone his comments about churches, not because I disagree with him that … More Christian Colleges as Businesses
The three most frightening moments in my life, in descending order: 3. The breath that precedes the first word of every single lecture I’ve ever given. 2. The half-second between the end of me asking, “Will you marry me?” and my wife answering, “Of course.” 1. Every single second between now and approximately 9:00am CST … More The Fear of Preaching
Happy Reformation Day, everyone! My friend Sam and I made this video for Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class several years ago. (The words are by a Lutheran pastor from Iowa.) Remarkably, it’s now been seen well over 120,000 times on YouTube, and it never fails that we run into or hear from excited students … More This Day in History: “Papal Bulls, Indulgences, and Transubstantiation!”
Last week here at The Pietist Schoolman and elsewhere: Here Why the Evangelical Covenant Church has typically viewed activities like packing meals for hungry children in Africa as going hand in hand with conversionism, biblicism, and other hallmarks of evangelicalism No This Week in History but one day in the United Nations’ history brought to … More That Was The Week That Was
One of these days I’m going to have to write a series trying to explain what the Evangelical Covenant Church is. My denomination is a small one (fewer than 200,000 members in the US), hard to understand if you didn’t grow up in it, and yet growing fast. (More than half the current denominational membership … More Feed My Starving Children
10/27/11 – On this week’s episode of CWC: The Radio Show… Amy, Sara, Sam, and I discuss Halloween costumes for kids and adults, compare ourselves to Friday Night Lights characters, evaluate Renaissance views of humanity, and launch Sara’s one-issue presidential candidacy. Get episodes here, or click on the logo on the right side of the … More This Week on CWC: The Radio Show
Today I’ll wrap up my series on Carolyn Weber’s lovely memoir, Surprised by Oxford, with a relatively short post (short, at least, in terms of material I’ll cover from the book itself). Now, when I last I blogged about this memoir, I went on at some length about the story of Weber’s conversion to Christianity … More Surprised by Oxford: Eastertide and After
In the last two weeks of my Modern Europe course, we’ve twice run headlong into the hardest question historians ask: Why? First, I had my students read The Dynamite Club, John Merriman’s account of Émile Henry, a young French anarchist who threw a bomb into a crowded Paris café in 1894 — thereby, in John’s … More Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”
It’s a pretty uninteresting “week in history,” so I’m going to let that feature take some time off and come back reinvigorated next week. But one event this day in history prompted some reflection: October 24, 1945 – The United Nations comes into being When the five members of the Security Council (USSR, US, Britain, … More This Day in History: Peace vs. Justice
What you might have missed in the last seven days here at The Pietist Schoolman or elsewhere on interesting blogs, op-ed pages, etc. Here Celebrating some free advertising for our Pietist Impulse book! My attempts to venture into biblical studies and the history of rhetoric: when did Micah 6:8 become the social justice verse, and … More That Was the Week That Was
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