The day after we got back from Thanksgiving travels my wife and kids went to bed early, so I seized the chance to watch something I’d had on our queue for a long time: the first episode of the BBC’s Sherlock, an updating of the Sherlock Holmes character to the 21st century that features the … More Sherlock!
During my Thanksgiving hiatus I’ll be reprising some older posts: one each from June/July, August, September, and October. The following comes from July 22, near the end of my series taking readers day-by-day through a proposed travel version of my course HIS230L World War I. You can see an overview/index of the whole series here. … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: A War of Words
Today I’ll wrap up my series on Carolyn Weber’s lovely memoir, Surprised by Oxford, with a relatively short post (short, at least, in terms of material I’ll cover from the book itself). Now, when I last I blogged about this memoir, I went on at some length about the story of Weber’s conversion to Christianity … More Surprised by Oxford: Eastertide and After
10/21/11 – Start your Christmas shopping early and order The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, now available for Kindle!
10/19/11 – Every month Christianity Today, the leading evangelical magazine in this country, features a set of mini-book reviews by John Wilson, editor of CT’s awesome sister publication, Books and Culture. Now, I would have been happy just to know that John Wilson knew of our book, let alone read it. But to our utter … More The Pietist Impulse Hits the Big Time
After a multi-week hiatus, I’ve finally got a chance to return to our series blogging through Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (InterVarsity Press). If you’re just joining the conversation, you can find the beginning of the series here. We’re moving from Africa to India, which will … More Clouds of Witnesses: “Failure” in India
Today I’m returning to my series on Carolyn Weber’s spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Oxford, and finding her at a pivotal point in her story of coming to faith. When last we heard from Weber, she was back home in Canada for a difficult Christmas: breaking things off with her would-be fiancé, who wished that he … More Surprised by Oxford: Hilary Term
Is humanity becoming more peaceful? Yes, says psychologist Steven Pinker in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking), glowingly reviewed by bioethicist Peter Singer in this past Sunday’s The New York Times. You’ve got to be kidding, replies philosopher John Gray, reviewing the same book earlier this fall … More The Long Peace
In 1911, the country of Italy celebrated its 50th birthday as a unified nation-state. The Italian government marked the occasion with a special census that revealed, among other things, that one out of every six Italians lived outside of Italy. Between 1880 and 1914, thirteen million Italians emigrated to the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, … More Italy as an “Emigrant Nation”
10/10/11 – For some reason, the top post here the last few days has been one that I did nearly a month ago critiquing “muscular Christianity.” In light of the apparent mini-surge of interest in that topic, let me also recommend today’s New York Times article on Nathan Whitaker, the Duke- and Harvard-educated author who … More More on Muscular Christianity
The Pietist Schoolman 