I’m getting off to a slow start today, having stayed up until the wee hours to watch the Chicago Cubs pull out a dramatic, extra innings victory over the Cleveland Indians in a memorable World Series Game 7 that featured a reserve catcher who’s almost as old as me hitting a home run in his … More “The Last Time the Cubs Won…”
Here… • My first post at The Anxious Bench surveyed British Christian responses to next week’s “Brexit” referendum. • I knew that would be the topic this time last week. But I certainly didn’t know that my second Bench post would be the same day, that it would respond to a mass shooting, or that it would focus on … More That Was The Week That Was
For Martin Luther King, Jr. Day… Here’s a series of three posts I wrote in the summer of 2014, inspired by Ed Gilbreath’s Birmingham Revolution, on King’s famous letter from a jail in that Alabama city. Gilbreath (author of Reconciliation Blues and executive director of communications for my denomination) provides enough biographical and historical context that I began to realize just how little … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Birmingham Revolution
Click-baity? Sure, but only half as click-baity as what Russell Moore did this week for the Southern Baptists… Here are five things I wish everyone knew about Pietists: We still exist If most people know anything about Pietism, they most likely think of a religious movement in the late 17th and early 18th century. But unlike other Christian traditions, … More 5 Things I Wish Everyone Knew About Pietists
When the editorial staff of The New Republic resigned last year in a clash with new ownership, I pretty much resolved never to read the venerable magazine again. But I’ve found myself clicking those links again, most often when they address a topic that was never exactly a strength of the old TNR: religion. Most of this is thanks to … More Is Cornel West (or Michael Eric Dyson) a Prophet?
Not long after our panel on social media concluded, the Smothers Theater at Pepperdine University began to fill in, as Conference on Faith and History members gathered for what was clearly the most prominent (or, at least, most-tweeted) concurrent session of the meeting: Closing the afternoon with a discussion of David Bebbington's work on the … More CFH 2014: 25 Years of the Bebbington Quadrilateral
Among the many people to whom I recommended Ed Gilbreath’s new book this summer were colleagues and students in Bethel University’s Christianity and Western Culture (CWC) course. While that course effectively ends its narrative around 1800 (I go as far as the British parliament abolishing the slave trade in 1807) and we barely touch on U.S. history, the … More Birmingham Revolution: Not Everyone’s a Prophet
From this past June: my three-part attempt to explain my little-known, fast-growing denomination, and why it’s so distinctive. This past June I flew from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Chicago, where I represented my congregation at Gather ’14, the annual meeting of our denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church. “What’s the Evangelical Covenant Church?” at least one person just asked. … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: What’s the Evangelical Covenant Church?
In my day job as a history professor, I’ve spent a lot of time in the past week investigating the experience of immigrants during World War I. And since most of the faculty and students at Bethel in 1917-18 were either born in Sweden themselves or the children or grandchildren of such immigrants, I’ve also been thinking about my own … More What’s the Evangelical Covenant Church? “An Immigrant Church”
Where did Memorial Day start? What does it mean? If pressed, most of us could probably guess that it emerged from the wake of the Civil War and perhaps explain that it differs from, say, Veterans Day or Armed Forces Day in specifically remembering those who have died in military service to this country. Writing in the midst of the Vietnam War, … More Revising Memorial Day
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