For most of the 2010s, my Bethel colleague Sam Mulberry and I had the joy of leading a biennial travel course on World War I in western Europe. Spending that time crisscrossing western Europe was such a highlight of my teaching experience that I decided to see if there might be any non-students interested in … More Announcing Our June 2023 Tour of Germany
Earlier this summer I argued on Substack that you can’t really call yourself a liberal arts college if you’re not offering liberal arts majors. As my Bethel colleague Jim Beilby correctly intuited in his response, I didn’t mean that it’s necessary to offer an entire array of every field in the arts, humanities, and sciences. … More How Common Is the History Major among Christian Colleges?
A year after we started with the oldest Christian tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, this month we concluded the Following Jesus conversation with the newest branch in the family tree: Pentecostalism. Drew University professor J. Terry Todd alluded to the familiar origin story of Azusa Street in 1906 and quoted its most famous figure. But even as … More Following Jesus: The Pentecostal Tradition
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”
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
For the penultimate installment in our year-long conversation about how different Christians follow Jesus, we heard from the distinguished Latter-day Saints scholar Robert Millet, an ideal conversation partner by any standard. Retired now after over three decades as a professor, department chair, and dean at Brigham Young University, Millet has facilitated numerous conversations between Mormons … More Following Jesus: The Latter-day Saints Tradition
Between final exams and commencement last week and leading a faculty workshop and grading this week, I’ve been a little late to check in on this month’s Following Jesus conversation. But don’t let that delay (or this too-brief introduction) deter you from checking out a highly important installment in the project, featuring an opening essay … More Following Jesus: The Black Church Tradition
We’re planning to record one more special episode this summer to conclude our first season of the College for Christians podcast, but this week we paused to answer a couple of questions from listeners — plus one that we had ourselves but had never fully addressed. Stream or download that episode from Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, … More College for Christians: Some Listener Q&A
Earlier this week I was invited to talk about Bethel’s history at a dinner celebrating the university’s 150th anniversary. For once I spoke without notes, but here’s the best I can do to reconstruct what I said: my attempt to make our history more personal for more people, rather than focusing on the stories of … More What Is Bethel? The Moments That Make Up Our History
“If Lutheranism is the parent of Pietism,” I began my response this month in the Following Jesus conversation, “then surely the Wesleyan Tradition is the closest cousin to my own.” Started by English Protestants who had been profoundly shaped by their encounters with Pietism, Methodism and the other Christian movements that originated with John Wesley … More Following Jesus: The Wesleyan Tradition
The Pietist Schoolman 