On the very short list of reasons that I wish I weren’t spending my fall on sabbatical in the Blue Ridge mountains is the fact that I won’t be at Bethel University on Tuesday, December 13th for the 2016 Bethel Colloquium on Pietism. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t be there! For a mere $5 (to … More Register for the 2016 Bethel Colloquium on Pietism
By the end of this week, Mark and I will have submitted the manuscript for our book on Pietism and the future of Christianity. As it happens, this stage concludes as churches like ours prepare to celebrate Reformation Sunday, and our book will come out in 2017 — the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, Martin Luther is currently … More Reformed and Always Reforming… Even 499 Years Later
Well, most of it. I was at the banquet for the Conference on Faith and History biennial meeting in Virginia Beach, VA and missed the first five minutes of Hamilton’s America tonight on PBS. Then after I burst into our hotel room and saw that Katie was watching, I just sat in rapturous joy for a few … More Why Yes, I Did Live-Tweet the Hamilton Documentary
In honor of the Hamilton documentary premiering tonight on PBS… Once more, with feeling: I’m not one for delaying gratification. But I somehow summoned the willpower to avoid buying the chart-topping cast recording of the acclaimed musical Hamilton until last month, when I knew that we would need listening material for our cross-country trip to Virginia. I was not disappointed. … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: On Hamilton and History
On Monday I shared a few things that I’m enjoying right now. I left one off the list in order to come back to it today: Yes, among the many other blessings of this sabbatical — time with my wife and kids, time with my parents, time to write and read — I get to visit the … More The Blue Ridge Parkway
Thanks to conservative intellectual Eric Metaxas, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has become a member of this crazy election’s extended cast of characters. At multiple points this year (most recently in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and then a series of tweets), Metaxas has hearkened back to his Bonhoeffer biography in order to make the case for supporting Donald Trump. We ARE responsible for … More The Bonhoeffer Effect, “Unpleasant Parallels,” and the 2016 Election
I don’t regret participating in our national angsting over the presidential election, but I can’t say it’s been much fun. So before diving back into that mess, I thought I’d toss off something vastly less serious: a few of the things in life — other than my family — that I’m currently enjoying. Or, a few … More A Few of My Favorite Things, or America’s Already Pretty Great
Here… • I’m mostly past worrying about pageviews, but if you missed my observations about the past and politics in southwestern Virginia… I do think it deserves more attention than it got. • But more importantly, Andy Crouch’s Trump editorial in Christianity Today got a huge readership. • Reader Sean O’Neil suggested that Christian intellectuals are actually planting some important seeds during … More That Was The Week That Was
One of the benefits of working at a place like Bethel is that I get to learn from brilliant colleagues like Adam Johnson, who teaches cognitive neuroscience in our psychology department. Adam’s research focuses on memory, decision-making, and moral psychology and has been supported by grants from BioLogos and the National Institutes of Health. In this guest post, he draws on insights … More Moral Psychology and Politics: Why Is the Trump Tape Such a Revelation to Evangelicals? (Adam Johnson)
Last Thursday I reached a point where I wondered aloud whether evangelical support for Donald Trump ought to make Christian intellectuals like me (many of whom have publicly criticized Trump and his evangelical enablers) question if we exert any significant influence. Yesterday’s news that Books & Culture will cease publication didn’t alleviate that angst. But fortunately, many of you wrote helpful comments … More Further Thoughts on the Impact of Christian Intellectuals (Sean O’Neil)
The Pietist Schoolman 