While I catch up on grading some overdue midterms… Enjoy one of the reflections I wrote after reading Lauren Winner’s Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis this past summer. As you might guess from the title, Lauren Winner spends plenty of time alone with her thoughts in Still, but it doesn’t usually take more than … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: The Potluck Church
I may play the role, but I’m not a historian of Christianity, or any other religion. I edit books, write articles, give papers, and blog about Pietism, and I teach courses on Christianity and Western Culture and The Reformations, but my graduate education was overseen by this guy and this guy; I somehow never took … More Matthew Bowman’s The Mormon People
10/12/12 – Thanks to my recent CFH co-panelist Jared Burkholder for publishing a three-part interview with David Swartz, on his important new history of the “evangelical left,” Moral Minority. Here’s a taste from part one: Swartz explained that, for evangelical readers like myself, he wrote the book “to offer a sense of context. Just about … More The Moral Minority
If years were measured by the stature of the historians who die during them, 2012 would have to rank right up there. I wrote earlier this year in tribute to the military historian John Keegan. Then last week we lost Eugene Genovese, one of the leading scholars of the American South, and American intellectual historian … More Eric Hobsbawm: A Historian and His Hope
Few books have been as significant in my professional life as Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation, edited (and about half-written) by the husband and wife team of Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, of Messiah College. I first encountered it in 2006, during a summer workshop at Bethel University led by the Jacobsens. … More Religion’s “Return” to Higher Education
Eleven years ago this morning I was in Hamden, Connecticut, waking up after a late night of dissertation writing to turn on CNN in time to watch the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Those structures stood less than two hours’ drive away from my apartment, and I knew people who lived in … More This Day in History: 9/11
I’m a PhD-holding history professor myself who will likely never write any book with sales approaching even quadruple figures, but I cringe when fellow guild-members like Louisiana State University professors Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg write things like the following, in Salon this past Sunday: Frankly, we in the history business wish we could take out … More Who Owns History?
It’s been almost three weeks since my last post inspired by Lauren Winner’s Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. So let’s start with some review: Still finds Winner (a historian who teaches Christian spirituality at Duke Divinity School and writes for a wide array of publications) “in the middle of the spiritual life,” an awkward place … More Reflections on Lauren Winner’s Still: Friendship
In the current issue of my denomination’s magazine, The Covenant Companion, Jay Phelan reviews the newest book from historian Diana Butler Bass, Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. (Alas, the review isn’t available for download at the Companion site.) As summarized by Phelan, Bass stresses that … More Is “Christianity after Religion” a Kind of “Neo-Pietism”?
I don’t know anyone who loves books as much as my colleague G.W. Carlson (previously the subject of a post on Pietism in the Baptist General Conference), whom I had the pleasure of interviewing this May, just a couple of weeks before he retired from full-time teaching after having been at Bethel since 1968. (Here’s my … More The Joy of Reading
The Pietist Schoolman 