Earlier this summer, Michael Lind suggested that Barack Obama ought to run for the presidency in 2012 — as a Republican. His (satirical) argument was that Obama’s domestic (if not foreign) policies hearken back to the golden years of liberal-moderate Republicanism (think Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller), a time when being fiscally conservative (but not … More “Saint Mark”: An Appreciation of Mark Hatfield
Today I’m starting a new series that builds on a talk I gave at Bethel last spring. It takes up the thesis that Pietism has a “usable past” capable of distinctively and beneficially shaping Christian higher education. Pages and pages have been written on Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Anabaptist, and other Christian traditions and how their … More The Usable Past of Christian Colleges
We’ve rounded the bend and are more than halfway home in our preview of The Pietist Impulse in Christianity. Today: part five examines four manifestations of the Pietist impulse among Swedish and Norwegian Christians (both in the Old World and New). For many, this would seem an obscure chapter in the history of Pietism. But … More The Pietist Impulse: Scandinavians
In case you missed any or all of it the first time… Last week I completed a six-part series considering some significant critiques of Pietism by leading Mennonite scholars like Harold Bender and Robert Friedmann. We’ll pick up on some of the themes in a new series starting this week, asking whether Pietism provides a … More Anabaptist Critiques of Pietism: An Overview
Brainstorming possible August holidays last week made me think that some of my readers might appreciate the occasional excuse to declare their own personal celebration and take a day off. So let us commence a new, recurring feature here at The Pietist Schoolman, with the rarely-before-used title, “This Week in History”! August 8, 1988 – … More This Week in History
Part four of our romp through The Pietist Impulse in Christianity raises another deceptively simple question, “Was John Wesley a Pietist?” Even if one accepts a definition of “Pietist” that encompasses people other than early modern German Lutherans, Wesley is a controversial figure. He is included in Carter Lindberg’s popular collection, The Pietist Theologians, and … More The Pietist Impulse: Wesley
Today we come to the end of a series that has looked at 20th century (neo)Anabaptist critiques of Pietism, starting with Harold Bender‘s influential “Anabaptist Vision” speech and Robert Friedmann‘s famously anti-Pietist “thesis.” After a pause to sum up that critique and look at its continuing influence, we examined how revisionist and post-revisionist Anabaptist historians … More What Pietists Can Learn from the Anabaptist Vision
My family just got back from traveling to Michigan, where we attended a family wedding and had the chance to catch up with some good friends of mine from grad school. As a gadabout academic who can spend an hour of his summer holiday researching and writing about the following topic, this kind of diversion … More Why Are There No Holidays in August?
As we’ve already heard from Roger Olson, Pietism is often caricatured as being anti-intellectual, and Pietists as being so concerned to avoid head-centered “dead orthodoxy” that they substitute heart-centered emotional subjectivism. In part three of our series previewing chapters in our new book, The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, we find that tension, but more importantly, … More The Pietist Impulse: Modernity
In case you missed any or all of it the first time, here’s an overview of my just-concluded series thinking through a proposal to turn my “January term” course on the history of World War I into a study trip through England, Belgium, France, and Germany. I started with some words of introduction, then continued … More Over There: An Overview
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