Maybe some of you appear in the news media all the time. I don’t. So in a week that’s already seen me quoted in Christianity Today‘s story about the troubling situation at North Greenville University, it’s a bit overwhelming also to see an interview with me appear on the website of my denomination’s magazine, The Covenant Companion. Reporter Stan … More New Interview on Pietism and Higher Education
If you offered me fifteen minutes to share what’s at the heart of my belief as a Christian and how that shapes my understanding of education, I think this is the best answer I could give. It’s the text of the convocation address I delivered yesterday in the opening chapel of the 2015-2016 academic year at Bethel University. Thanks to … More The Body of Christ
Until he died last night, I had no idea that horror film director Wes Craven had graduated from Wheaton College. (He discussed his fundamentalist Baptist upbringing and his decision to flee from it in a 2011 interview with the New York Times Magazine.) Of course, this got me wondering: who else would I be surprised to learn … More Who Are the Most Surprising Christian College Alumni?
As a member of the Evangelical Covenant Church, I was thrilled to see our denomination’s university, North Park, hire sociologist Michael Emerson as its new provost. Most recently on faculty at Rice University, he taught at Bethel in the mid-to-late Nineties. Probably best known for writing Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America with … More Michael Emerson on the Role of the Christian University
Even before we started in on this run of posts about controversies in the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU), I had been thinking about why it is that I have come to identify so closely with that model of higher education. I didn’t attend a Christian college — or even apply to them. … More What Do You Love about Christian Colleges?
As one Baptist member abruptly withdraws from Christian higher ed’s leading organization and a Wesleyan school threatens to do so if Goshen and Eastern Mennonite are not expelled from the CCCU by August 31st, I hope many in the Christian college world will join Spring Arbor professor John Hawthorne in supporting the people of those two Anabaptist institutions: I don’t think … More Why I Hope Goshen and Eastern Mennonite Stay in the CCCU
I don’t normally write blog posts in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, but I made the mistake of checking Twitter before bed and couldn’t sleep after reading this from John Mark Reynolds, the former provost of Houston Baptist University: Christian Higher Ed: years of drift, grifters, and failure to change bringing a crisis. … More A Hopeful Vision for Christian Higher Education
World magazine reports that several other members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) have threatened to quit the organization if, at the end of August, its membership still includes Goshen College and Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) — the two Mennonite schools that announced last month that they would hire faculty and staff in same-sex marriages. Only … More Standing with the CCCU
When I asked Devin Manzullo-Thomas to write a post providing some historical context for two Mennonite schools becoming the first members of the largely evangelical Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) to allow for the hiring of employees in same-sex marriages, I pointed him towards a World magazine story featuring this ominous paragraph: Dub Oliver, president of Union University … More Quick Thoughts on Union University Withdrawing from the CCCU
Today we welcome back to the blog Devin Manzullo-Thomas, director of the Sider Institute for Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan Studies at Messiah College. I’ve asked Devin — whose research often takes him to the intersection between Anabaptist and Evangelical Christianity — to provide some perspective on the decision by two Mennonite members of the Council for Christian … More Mennonites, Evangelicals, and the Sexuality Debate in Christian Higher Ed (Devin Manzullo-Thomas)
The Pietist Schoolman 