It’s hard for me to get too excited about January 1st. I mean, it’s as good an arbitrary point as any to change calendars. So long as we bracket off the fact that — beyond the West — it’s a kind of vestige of colonialism to use that calendar in the first place. So long … More Is New Year’s Day a “Christian Holiday”?
12/26/13 – Over at the Religion in American History blog, Brantley Gasaway was kind enough to draw readers’ attention to my Evangelical Theological Society paper that encouraged an international/transnational turn in the history of evangelicalism. (My paper was a response to David Swartz’s chapter on Latin American evangelicals in Moral Minority; Gasaway interviewed Swartz last … More Brantley Gasaway on My ETS Paper
A few weeks ago, when Chris crafted some questions for me to answer, he asked me to talk a bit about the Moravians – a Pietist movement that that I happen to study quite a lot. “What might a churchly Pietist like myself learn from the Moravians?” he asked. I thought this was especially interesting … More On Moravians and Other Radical Voices
Consider the birds of the sky, that they do not sow or reap or gather produce into barns, and your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth more than they are? (Matt 6:26, Lexham English Bible) When I was in grad school, my advisor occasionally invited us to go birdwatching with him. While I … More What Christians Can Learn from Birdwatching
In part because it only happens twice a year, but mostly because I appreciate its aims and quality, the arrival of the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of the newsletter Pietisten made for a good start to finals week. As always, there’s a lot of diverse content to savor in this issue, let me just note a … More In the Fall/Winter 2013 Issue of Pietisten…
What follows is as good a summation of what we do in Christian higher education as I know. It’s courtesy of my friend and frequent collaborator Sam Mulberry. Background: yesterday morning we held our semester-ending “synthesizing dialogue” with 140 students in Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class. It was my twentieth such conclusion, which still … More “Wounded and Healed”: A Benediction for Fall 2013 (Sam Mulberry)
About six months ago I explored the question, “How Well Paid Are Christian College Faculty?“, and found that “even the best of the evangelical college set can struggle to keep up with their self-defined peers” when it comes to paying professors. Is the same true of our bosses? On Sunday the Chronicle of Higher Education … More How Well Paid Are Christian College Presidents?
Last Thursday morning in the Bethel University Library, philosopher David Williams (Azusa Pacific University) returned to his alma mater to give the seventh and final talk in a series previewing chapters from Whole and Holy Persons: A Pietist Approach to Christian Higher Education (forthcoming in late 2014 from InterVarsity Press). In “The Pietist Impulse and … More Watch the Entire Series of Talks Previewing Our Book on Pietism and Higher Education
12/13/13 – Not long after I posted yesterday’s sampling of histories and biographies that made the cut on leading “Best of 2013” lists, Christianity Today named God’s Forever Family, Larry Eskridge’s history of the Jesus People movement, its inaugural “Book of the Year.” (Eskridge also won the History/Biography category in CT’s Book Awards.) So that’s … More One More “Best of 2013” Book
Track this and tell me that God doesn’t work in mysterious ways: 1. When I was hired to come to a Baptist/Pietist/evangelical college as the new European historian, I was expected to teach an upper-level course on the Reformations. The last time I had studied this chapter in history was… oh, the first week of … More Why I’m Almost a Lutheran
The Pietist Schoolman 