I’ll be down in New Ulm, Minnesota this Thursday evening giving a free lecture as part of the city’s centennial series on World War I. A German-American enclave in the southern part of the state, New Ulm had a difficult experience of the war, with its municipal leadership suspected of sedition by the state. You can learn … More Previewing My Talk on World War I Memorials
If you couldn’t attend my lecture last week in Chicago, it’s now streaming online via North Park University. Entitled “The Pietist Option for (Current and Former) Evangelicals,” the talk suggested how Pietism might renew evangelicalism — by way of “a Pietist gloss” on the familiar evangelical themes of biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism. Click here to watch the … More Now Streaming: My Talk on “The Pietist Option for Evangelicals”
Among several speaking engagements coming up this winter and spring, I’m particularly excited to announce that I’ll be giving a lecture on Pietism on Tuesday night, February 21st at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. Scheduled for 7:00pm in Nyvall Hall’s Olsson Lounge, I’m calling the lecture “The Pietist Option for (Current and Former) Evangelicals.” I’ll be … More The Pietist Option for (Current and Former) Evangelicals: My February 21 Lecture at North Park
All next month I’ll be teaching an adult Sunday School class at Salem Covenant Church (New Brighton, MN) on a favorite topic of mine: “The Church and the Wars of the 20th Century.” It’ll be offered twice each Sunday, at 9:45am and 11:00am in Salem’s Fellowship Hall. Here’s the summary blurb: This spring will mark … More My New Adult Sunday School Class: “The Church and the Wars of the 20th Century”
Having offered some unsolicited homiletic advice last Saturday, I thought today I might share a rare example of my own preaching: a sermon I delivered last month in Denver, to set up a four-class series at Covenant Village of Colorado on the history of Christians engaging with the wider culture. For the Sunday evening vespers service, I meditated … More Habitation and Homelessness: My Sermon on Citizenship
One more parable, also from Mark 4: Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. … More Parables: Roots
A list, but it can’t be click-baity with this kind of bait, right? So this past Tuesday my friend Sam Mulberry and I got to co-host a special presentation in the Bethel University Library: a walk down memory lane for GES130 Christianity and Western Culture, a staple of Bethel’s gen ed curriculum for three decades now. While it was … More 6 Reasons to Watch a 40-Minute Tribute to a 30-Year Old Western Civ Course
They certainly doesn’t exhaust what I have to say about the life and legacy of G.W. Carlson (1943-2016), but given four or five minutes of his memorial service yesterday, these were the comments I chose to share. My first conversation with G.W. Carlson took place two weeks shy of fourteen years ago: I was in town for my … More “I Was a Stranger” (For GW)
It sounds like the public speaking version of a basket on Chopped: a 7th grade class photo, an Irish poem, a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and a visit to Dachau. But somehow they all found their way into “Can Hope and History Rhyme?”, a talk I gave last week at Mounds Park Academy, the private school … More Can Hope and History Rhyme? (My MPA Talk)
One advantage of having this J-term off is that I’ve been able to accept and prepare for a few more speaking engagements than usual for this time of year. Remarkably, they all cover different topics: • This Sunday morning (Jan. 17, 10am), I’ll be at Presbyterian Church of the Way (Shoreview, MN) to address their “Third Sunday … More Where You Can Hear Me Speak This Winter
The Pietist Schoolman 