This hasn’t been the kind of blog where posts often consist of extended quotations from other blogs framed by some brief comments of my own. But today I’ll break with that pattern, since (a) sermon prep (still can’t believe I’m writing those words) is proving a welcome but time-consuming distraction from blogging, and (b) John … More History and Civic Virtue
The other day Roger Olson asked (rhetorically) whether Christian organizations should adopt a business model. (Hint: the answer isn’t yes.) He was chiefly concerned with the two types of Christian organizations with which he (and I) mostly interact: colleges and churches. I’ll leave alone his comments about churches, not because I disagree with him that … More Christian Colleges as Businesses
The three most frightening moments in my life, in descending order: 3. The breath that precedes the first word of every single lecture I’ve ever given. 2. The half-second between the end of me asking, “Will you marry me?” and my wife answering, “Of course.” 1. Every single second between now and approximately 9:00am CST … More The Fear of Preaching
Happy Reformation Day, everyone! My friend Sam and I made this video for Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class several years ago. (The words are by a Lutheran pastor from Iowa.) Remarkably, it’s now been seen well over 120,000 times on YouTube, and it never fails that we run into or hear from excited students … More This Day in History: “Papal Bulls, Indulgences, and Transubstantiation!”
One of these days I’m going to have to write a series trying to explain what the Evangelical Covenant Church is. My denomination is a small one (fewer than 200,000 members in the US), hard to understand if you didn’t grow up in it, and yet growing fast. (More than half the current denominational membership … More Feed My Starving Children
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
In the last two weeks of my Modern Europe course, we’ve twice run headlong into the hardest question historians ask: Why? First, I had my students read The Dynamite Club, John Merriman’s account of Émile Henry, a young French anarchist who threw a bomb into a crowded Paris café in 1894 — thereby, in John’s … More Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”
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
He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8, TNIV) Let me say right off the bat: I believe Christians ought to seek social justice. We follow a Savior who opened … More Micah 6:8 in Christian Rhetoric
The Pietist Schoolman 