Almighty God, you have knit your people together in one communion in the mystical body of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant us grace to follow your blessed saints in lives of faith and commitment, and to know the inexpressible joys you have prepared for those who love you, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and … More All Saints’ Day and the Stewardship of the Past
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
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 had intended to write a series of these “dispatches,” and I still might have one or two more things to add before we head back to Minnesota. But for now, I put together a few observations about our time in one of the most strongly pro-Trump parts of the country. For my fall sabbatical, my … More Dispatches from Trump Country: The Past and Politics
Last week our family spent several days in Washington, DC and Pennsylvania, taking the kids to historic sites ranging from the Air & Space Museum to the Gettysburg battlefield. Indeed, one of my favorite things about this fall’s sabbatical is that it lets us continue the historical exploration that we did much of the summer back in Minnesota. … More 6 Things I’ve Learned about Teaching History to 6-Year Olds
The last two weeks I’ve tried to convince Anxious Bench readers that we tend to overemphasize the influence of books on Christianity, while understating that of other types of writings: e.g., hymns and prayers. As I conclude that series today, I go beyond the written word altogether and offer some historical and theological reflections on the most famous American … More Beyond Books: The “Head of Christ”
Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest And let these gifts to us be blessed Amen Today I’m happy to continue my new Anxious Bench series — on Christian writings that don’t take the form of books — by reflecting on the table grace that I’ve known all my life and am now teaching my children. Here’s an … More Beyond Books: “Come, Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest”
As longtime readers know, I love Christian hymnody, especially that of my own tradition, Scandinavian Pietism. So I was happy for the excuse to revisit those songs as I kicked off a new Anxious Bench series today: on looking beyond books to other types of Christian writing. It’s a kind of belated response to the top 25 Christian writings list that Christian … More Beyond Books: Hymns as Christian Writing
With the 2016 Summer Olympics just days away, let’s test your knowledge of the religious history of the games: Who banned the ancient Olympics in AD 393, and for what religious reason? What 1935 initiative had the joint support of Reinhold Niebuhr, the first Catholic to be a major party nominee for president, and the … More Religion in The Olympics… And The Olympics as Religion
Time to show my hand and reveal of my favorite examples of historical moviemaking. Well, TV series-making, but then that’s just another form of the motion picture. After spending two Anxious Bench posts developing a set of four criteria for evaluating that kind of storytelling, today I applied them to two cable TV shows: the feminist time-traveling drama Outlander (Starz!) … More Soviets and Sassenachs: My Two Favorite Historical TV Series
The Pietist Schoolman 