If Advent is a season of anticipation and Lent one of introspection, then Christmas is one of adoration, as so many of its best loved songs make clear. It’s a quiet time of tender reverence, as we imagine ourselves in the little town of Bethlehem (“how still we see thee lie”) on a silent night … More Twelve Days: “Heaven and Nature Sing”
Welcome to the start of another in my occasional attempts to blog through part of the daily lectionary. I’ll start this run of twelve Christmastide meditations on Christmas Eve, then resume on the 26th. My favorite moment in my current favorite TV series involves my favorite words from one of my favorite Christmas carols. In … More Twelve Days: Amid Bleak Winters
Every once in a while, leading higher ed publications like The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed report on my particular sector, and I add those articles to my Saturday links wraps. But this week has seen an unusually large number of stories about Christian colleges in the mainstream media, so I thought I’d do a midweek collection of … More Christian Colleges in the News
So you’ve been in London teaching the history of World War I for a week and are getting ready to head to the former Western Front and have some down time while you catch up on laundry. What do you do? Record a podcast on a pair of iPhones, of course! Yes, Sam Mulberry and … More Live from London: Nothing Rhymes with Gehrz
It’s been a busy week elsewhere, so I’ve taken a brief break from Pietist Schoolman. But I’ll interrupt the hiatus long enough to share a couple of items related to the centennial of World War I: • First, in my capacity as a member of Minnesota’s WWI centennial commission… let me encourage all of you to … More A WWI Speaking Announcement… and How Churches Can Commemorate the Armistice
Some days are diamonds. Some days are rocks. Breaking: Tom Petty has died, family announces in a statement pic.twitter.com/Fca6emZwXc — Jon Passantino (@passantino) October 3, 2017 What a terrible way to end a terrible day. I don’t even know how to write anything new about mass shootings at this point. So instead I’ll mourn an … More “I Can’t Hold Out Forever”: RIP Tom Petty
“What’s Pietism?” It’s one of the most common questions I’m asked, and I still don’t have a concise answer cued up and ready to go. I’ll try to do better on that count before our book comes out this fall. But at least in some respects, I just want to sing yesterday’s pulpit hymn at … More Pietism in a (Musical) Nutshell
With Vacation Bible School and an adult Sunday School class completed and my fall textbooks ordered, today is the first full day of my summer break. For the next two months, you’ll probably find me spending my mornings in a variety of St. Paul area coffee shops, reading and writing on my MacBook as music … More My Summer Soundtrack
The third of the three short meditations I contributed to a Hanging of the Greens service last month. Merry Christmas to you all! It was December 1863, and America’s bloody Civil War had entered its third winter. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was grieving: two years before, his wife had died in a fire; less … More The Ringing of Bells: A Christmas Meditation
Well, most of it. I was at the banquet for the Conference on Faith and History biennial meeting in Virginia Beach, VA and missed the first five minutes of Hamilton’s America tonight on PBS. Then after I burst into our hotel room and saw that Katie was watching, I just sat in rapturous joy for a few … More Why Yes, I Did Live-Tweet the Hamilton Documentary
The Pietist Schoolman 