Just two days after I again lauded Books & Culture as my favorite periodical, this dismaying announcement came over the Twitter from B&C editor John Wilson: The Nov/Dec issue of @booksandculture will be the last unless we raise $110,000 in the next 3 days: http://t.co/VKv0Uy3C3l — John Wilson (@jwilson1812) September 4, 2013 Further details were … More Help Save “Books and Culture”!
If you’ve been wondering “Who is John Fea, and why has his forthcoming book, Why Study History? Reflecting on the Importance of the Past, been spotlighted in Christianity Today as “New and Noteworthy” and his blog, The Way of Improvement Leads Home, been named by one semi-knowledgeable source as one of ten by Christian historians that … More John Fea in The Juvenile Instructor
On Friday I led our department’s welcome sessions for new majors. For a while now I’ve made sure to dedicate part of that time to preemptively addressing the concern, “What do I do with a History major?” We’ve got better at making what sound to us like effective arguments — ruthlessly pragmatic explanations of the … More Christian Liberal Arts as Cathedral-Building
I’ve complained a couple of times that Christian Piatt’s recent (very popular) exercise in identifying “25 Christian Blogs You Should Be Reading” gave short shrift (both in the readers’ and editor’s versions) to academics — in particular, my fellow historians. To a significant extent, this is the fault of our guild; I’m afraid that Sam … More 10 Blogs by Christian Historians You Should Be Reading
Over at The Anxious Bench, Miles Mullin concluded a post on the history of progressive evangelicalism with an announcement that involves yours truly: …fellow Anxious Bench blogger, David Swartz, has penned Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age in Conservatism (2012), the best work on the topic to date. If you find yourself interested … More The Pietist Schoolman Goes to Baltimore
I’m about to head up to the second and final day of Bethel‘s annual faculty retreat, a venerable tradition meant to help us reconnect after a summer away, engage in some professional development (e.g., yesterday I sat in on a session about open access publishing and digital humanities), hear from our leaders, and worship together. … More The Christian Liberal Arts as Spiritual Retreat
Over at his Patheos blog, Christian Piatt is attempting a rather ambitious ranking of the “Top 25 Christian blogs you should be reading,” using a crowdsourcing/curating tool called Listly. It’s an interesting experiment that’s already yielded thousands of votes and over 250 nominations. Check it out if only to stumble across a blog you might … More On Ranking Christian Blogs
What do war and veterans memorials mean? What should we think or feel when we visit them? And who decides the answers to those questions? Not long after leaving Highway 61 (the famous road that follows the Mississippi River) and entering the southeastern Minnesota town of Wabasha, you’ll arrive at its small Veteran’s Memorial Park. … More Commemorating WWII: Meaning, Power, and Worship
Yesterday Elesha Coffman proposed a fun historical exercise over at the Religion in American History blog: develop an American equivalent to Mark Noll’s list of fourteen Turning Points in church history. It’s not as easy as it might seem. For example, she argued that American church history is both too big and too small to … More What Are the “Turning Points” in American Church History?
8/14/13 – This past spring the achievements of a Bethel English major named Abby Stocker inspired me to write a tribute to our students. This summer Abby has been interning at Christianity Today, and today posted an excellent essay at CT’s Her.meneutics blog reflecting on why “Our worship spaces matter.”
The Pietist Schoolman 