Before I write too many posts for The Anxious Bench, I thought I ought to explain “what I mean by ‘Pietist’ — and why I associate myself with a term that tends to inspire blank looks or antipathy.” A lot of what I have to say in that post should be familiar to readers of this blog, and to … More What It Means to Say “I’m a Pietist” in 2016
Quick math: (presidential campaign season + sudden conversion story + observers of evangelicalism on summer break) x (social media) = ? That’s right: #iftrumpwereevangelical! If you’re on Twitter, agree that the best response to fear is laughter, and enjoy inside references to evangelical subculture, then you should click on the day’s fastest-trending hashtag. (Well, the most hilarious.) Among my favorites … More #iftrumpwereevangelical
It’s too nice a summer day in Minnesota to stay inside for too long, but here’s a shortened version of TWTWTW: Here… • Year six of The Pietist Schoolman started with me revisiting a Baptist debate over religious freedom in the 1960s. • I wasn’t a delegate this year, but my denomination’s annual meeting had me reading through the expanding, increasingly … More That Was The Week That Was
I’m going to push back my usual Saturday links wrap until tomorrow. It’s proven impossible to ignore what happened in Britain this week, even though I’m not sure I actually have a lot of help to offer people wondering just what Brexit is or why it matters. I can’t explain just why the European Union has … More Scattered Thoughts on Brexit
As I begin work on a book with one of its pastors about its theological heritage, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Evangelical Covenant Church. So with delegates from its congregations gathering in Phoenix, Arizona for our denomination’s annual meeting, I thought I’d share a few quotations from a few of my favorite Covenanters, clustered around our denomination’s … More Glad Hearts: Some of My Favorite Voices from the Covenant Church
Republicans have garnered 77-78% of the evangelical vote in the last three major elections (2014, 2012, 2010). And it seems unlikely that Hillary Clinton will even reach the near-quarter of the evangelical vote that Barack Obama won in 2008. In April, Barna found that 81% of evangelicals had an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton — over … More Could Hillary Clinton Win a Significant Share of Evangelical Voters?
In the wake of the recent Southern Baptist debate about religious freedom for Muslims — and given the larger conversation about the meaning of religious freedom in an increasingly post-Christian society — I thought I’d use this week’s Anxious Bench post to revisit something I wrote about last year: how Baptists responded to the 1960s Supreme Court rulings against … More Religious Freedom: The Contested Core of Baptist Identity
My own 40th birthday felt momentous at the time, but today this blog turns 5 — and that’s the more shocking occasion of the two. When I convinced myself to give blogging a try in June 2011, it was intended as an experiment for summer break. I certainly didn’t expect to be doing it five years later, let alone that keeping this blog would so … More The Pietist Schoolman Turns Five!
Here… • My first post at The Anxious Bench surveyed British Christian responses to next week’s “Brexit” referendum. • I knew that would be the topic this time last week. But I certainly didn’t know that my second Bench post would be the same day, that it would respond to a mass shooting, or that it would focus on … More That Was The Week That Was
Ah, 2012: when I lamented how civil discourse was being replaced by “ideological segregation,” as the Left and Right engaged in “epistemic closure.” That phrase came from Julian Sanchez, who had observed that, among many conservatives, “Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with … More Conservatives for Progressives to Read (revisited)
The Pietist Schoolman 