Yesterday I dedicated my new Substack newsletter to reflecting on my first visit to Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. There’s nothing unexpected about seeing such a site in the capital city of Germany — though it is still striking (maybe not surprising) that it wasn’t until 2005 that the memorial was finally … More Unexpected Sites of Holocaust Remembrance: Berlin
After about a year and a half of deliberation, I decided over the weekend to start a Pietist Schoolman newsletter on Substack. Founded about five years ago, Substack provides writers with an easy means of hosting a newsletter that is both emailed directly to subscribers and can be shared as a link to a website. … More Check Out My Newsletter on Substack!
This week I revisited a familiar challenge facing Christian colleges, reflected on a visit to one of the “most cynical examples of Holocaust commemoration I’ve ever seen,” and shared one of the most satisfying reviews of my Lindbergh biography I’ve read yet. Elsewhere: • Fewer than 40% of Americans told Gallup they were “extremely” proud to … More That Was The Week That Was
Buchenwald was one of the most infamous concentration camps in the Nazi system, the final resting place of over fifty thousand victims. But until my colleague Sam Mulberry and I went there last month on our week-long tour of Germany, I didn’t know all that much about Buchenwald — including the fact that it has two … More When One Dictatorship Commemorated Resistance to Another
Earlier this month the Christian Reformed Church concluded a six-year debate on human sexuality by voting not only to uphold its traditional view that sex is reserved to man-woman marriage, but to confirm that belief’s “confessional status” — as pertaining to the Heidelberg Catechism’s statement against “unchastity.” I’m no expert on Reformed polity or theology, but … More Why, More Than Ever, Christian Colleges Need to Inhabit the “Messy Middle”
I’m glad for any review of Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America’s Most Infamous Aviator, but I’m especially tickled to see the one published recently in Church History, the journal of the American Society for Church History. “Ambiguity best characterizes both the life of Charles Lindbergh and the contemporary and historical interpretations of him,” … More “Understandable but not sympathetic”: The Latest Review of My Lindbergh Biography
This week: as I ended my six-year stint at The Anxious Bench, I rebooted this blog with posts on WWI commemoration in the German cities of Berlin and Wittenberg. Elsewhere: • Many conservative Christians celebrated two landmark rulings from the Supreme Court: though Friday’s, on abortion, may have already obscured the earlier one, on state funding … More That Was The Week That Was
No, it’s not unexpected that the capital of Germany would have commemorative sites related to World War I. But the ways that the memory of that war show up in Berlin can catch you off guard, as I discovered on my recent tour. Amazingly, I’d never been to Berlin, so we started by orienting ourselves … More Unexpected Sites of WWI Remembrance: Berlin
Yesterday I published the last of nearly 400 posts at The Anxious Bench, the group history blog at Patheos that I’ve edited since June 2016. After six years, I decided that it was time to step down from my role as AB’s “blogmeister” and main Tuesday writer. I don’t have a lot to add to … More A Big Change in My Writing Life
This month marks a kind of reset for The Pietist Schoolman, in two respects. First, I’m going to revive this blog, writing more regularly and less haphazardly than I have in recent months. Second, I just returned from my first trip to Europe since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With my friend and frequent … More Unexpected Sites of WWI Remembrance: Wittenberg
The Pietist Schoolman 