About two years ago I was invited to give a talk to our faculty in recognition of having been awarded Bethel’s 2009 Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching. In part one of this (slightly updated) version of the talk, I described my experiences integrating podcasts into two courses and evaluated them in light of the “No … More A Different Significance: Online vs. F2F Education (part 2)
I’ve mentioned once or twice before that my employer, Bethel University, is in the middle of developing its next master plan. We’ve seen a couple of scenarios from the consultants, and both anticipate a substantial expansion and renovation of our facilities: new buildings, sprucing up of old ones… It’s all very exciting, especially in this … More College Architecture and Christian Simplicity
The other day Roger Olson asked (rhetorically) whether Christian organizations should adopt a business model. (Hint: the answer isn’t yes.) He was chiefly concerned with the two types of Christian organizations with which he (and I) mostly interact: colleges and churches. I’ll leave alone his comments about churches, not because I disagree with him that … More Christian Colleges as Businesses
Today I’m going to wrap up a series of posts on the notion of Christian colleges looking to a “usable past” for guidance as they consider their missions and identities. Thus far, we’ve mostly found that schools founded by denominations originating (at least in part) in Pietism have not found such utility in that tradition. … More The Usable Past: Pietism and Bethel University
One of the most unlikely hot topics of the past month has been a kind of political theology that, to the extent it achieved any real popularity, peaked in the early 1980s: Dominion theology, or as New Yorker correspondent Ryan Lizza calls it in his now famous profile of Michelle Bachmann, Dominionism. It contends that … More Evangelicals and “Dominion” (part 1)
Today we wrap up our series previewing The Pietist Impulse in Christianity with a piece from Emilie Griffin that we’re calling our “benediction,” since it’s less a work of formal research than a blessing on those who have stuck with the book to its end and wonder where this impulse might be taking the Church. … More The Pietist Impulse: Benediction
The banner image running across each screen of this blog is cropped from a 1601 painting by the Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio, “Supper at Emmaus.” (Congratulations to Rachel Neiwert for winning yesterday’s challenge!) The story of the risen Jesus’ encounter with the two disciples traveling to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) has special meaning for me, in … More Emmaus Education
The Pietist Schoolman 