8/9/11 – My friend Sara Shady is quoted in a new Christianity Today article on the White House’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge, in which Bethel and several other evangelical colleges are participating. Sara explains how our students will work with Muslims in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul and addresses concerns that interreligious … More Christian Colleges and an Interfaith Initiative
We’ve rounded the bend and are more than halfway home in our preview of The Pietist Impulse in Christianity. Today: part five examines four manifestations of the Pietist impulse among Swedish and Norwegian Christians (both in the Old World and New). For many, this would seem an obscure chapter in the history of Pietism. But … More The Pietist Impulse: Scandinavians
In case you missed any or all of it the first time… Last week I completed a six-part series considering some significant critiques of Pietism by leading Mennonite scholars like Harold Bender and Robert Friedmann. We’ll pick up on some of the themes in a new series starting this week, asking whether Pietism provides a … More Anabaptist Critiques of Pietism: An Overview
Brainstorming possible August holidays last week made me think that some of my readers might appreciate the occasional excuse to declare their own personal celebration and take a day off. So let us commence a new, recurring feature here at The Pietist Schoolman, with the rarely-before-used title, “This Week in History”! August 8, 1988 – … More This Week in History
I confess: I brought my laptop along on our recent family vacation. But for the most part, I did a decent job of ignoring the blogosphere and focusing on more crucial tasks — e.g., how to get western Michigan sand off/out of every object and article of clothing we brought to the beach. So I’m … More That Was the Week That Was
8/5/11 – Coming up next week here at The Pietist Schoolman… Two more previews of The Pietist Impulse in Christianity take us from Scandinavia to North America, the joys of watching former students flourish, and a new series on Christian colleges.
Part four of our romp through The Pietist Impulse in Christianity raises another deceptively simple question, “Was John Wesley a Pietist?” Even if one accepts a definition of “Pietist” that encompasses people other than early modern German Lutherans, Wesley is a controversial figure. He is included in Carter Lindberg’s popular collection, The Pietist Theologians, and … More The Pietist Impulse: Wesley
Today we come to the end of a series that has looked at 20th century (neo)Anabaptist critiques of Pietism, starting with Harold Bender‘s influential “Anabaptist Vision” speech and Robert Friedmann‘s famously anti-Pietist “thesis.” After a pause to sum up that critique and look at its continuing influence, we examined how revisionist and post-revisionist Anabaptist historians … More What Pietists Can Learn from the Anabaptist Vision
My family just got back from traveling to Michigan, where we attended a family wedding and had the chance to catch up with some good friends of mine from grad school. As a gadabout academic who can spend an hour of his summer holiday researching and writing about the following topic, this kind of diversion … More Why Are There No Holidays in August?
As we’ve already heard from Roger Olson, Pietism is often caricatured as being anti-intellectual, and Pietists as being so concerned to avoid head-centered “dead orthodoxy” that they substitute heart-centered emotional subjectivism. In part three of our series previewing chapters in our new book, The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, we find that tension, but more importantly, … More The Pietist Impulse: Modernity
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