This week in our Intro to History class, my students and I read through the first half of Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind. He has at least four other books I’d rather teach — I spent a good ten minutes on Wednesday just reading aloud from … More The Liberal Arts as “Breaking Bread with the Dead”
This week I looked back at two weeks of teaching in the middle of a pandemic and looked back four years to a series of posts that anticipated my Lindbergh biography. Elsewhere: • Going back on campus has restored a sense of the weekday/weekend divide, but that’s certainly not true for everyone. • Molly Worthen … More That Was The Week That Was
This week at The Pietist Schoolman I looked at recent trends in the history major at religious colleges and universities, and Sam Mulberry and I concluded our podcast travelogue with a visit to Munich. Elsewhere… • It’s been a while since I’ve shared something from Kate Bowler… it seems timely to reconnect via her reflection on the … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • Whether in the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism, a leadership magazine for Pentecostals, or among our readers on Amazon, the reviews of The Pietist Option have continued to be encouraging. • About 60% of my readers say that their church is doing something special to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. • As our … More That Was The Week That Was
With just over a month until Election Day, I hope that lots of fellow Christians paid attention to Miroslav Volf’s interview with journalist Jonathan Merritt, since the Yale theologian makes a plausible argument that Hillary Clinton is not only the more competent of the two major party presidential candidates running for office now, but that the kind of vision she stands … More Have Christian Intellectuals Made Any Difference in This Election?
A week ago I asked, and many of you answered: “What are some indispensable Christian academic Twitter accounts?” Not just Christian scholars — like me — who mostly use Twitter to point to other platforms but those “who are using Twitter to engage each other and the public, or to curate ideas for their followers. Regular, thoughtful retweeters are as … More 7 Indispensable Christian Academic Twitter Accounts
Back in my very first post, I looked forward to using this blog to engage in “intellectual spring cleaning… to clear out some stray thoughts taking up mental space, expose them to the harsh light of day, and see if they look as profound on screen as they can sound in my mind at 1am.” I’ve learned not … More Blogging’s Impossible… Here’s How I’ll Try to Do It
I’ve spent a fair amount of time this month criticizing the leaders of other Christian colleges and universities. I don’t regret the posts, but it’s certainly not the kind of thing I enjoy writing. And it risks creating the false impression that I’m deeply dissatisfied with or disillusioned by Christian higher education. So as we near the … More Why I Love Being Part of a Christian Learning Community
The conflict of the Present and the Past, The ideal and the actual in our life, As on a field of battle held me fast, Where this world and the next world were at strife. For, as the valley from its sleep awoke, I saw the iron horses of the steam Toss to the morning air their plumes of smoke, And woke, as one awaketh from a dream. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Monte Cassino“ Almost fifteen hundred years ago a hermit in flight from Rome — “disgusted,” wrote Longfellow, with that city’s “vice and woe” — settled on a mountain in the Abruzzis, forming a community and writing a rule that would make him the father of Western monasticism. … More The Benedict Option
One thing I’ve learned in 3+ years of blogging is that the format tempts you into thinking that there are thoughts that will never be thought unless you think them, and words that will never be said unless you say them. So I’ve tried to avoid having a hair trigger — occasionally restraining myself from publishing even … More The “Farce” of Christian Higher Education
The Pietist Schoolman 