When I wasn’t researching the history of a much-loved children’s hymn, I was reading the following posts and articles: • Last week I mentioned the local Methodist church that received national attention for its supposed plan to expel older worshippers. That story inspired Emily McFarlan Miller to report on the larger challenge of “restarting” declining … More That Was The Week That Was
Today I’m happy to welcome my Bethel colleague Ruben Rivera to the blog. Educated at Vanguard University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Boston University, Ruben came to Bethel in 1997 as a history professor, and now serves as our chief diversity officer. He regularly speaks to Christian and community groups about shalom, diversity, and reconciliation. What … More Diversity, Shalom, and Remarkable Christianity (Ruben Rivera)
Here… • I announced that I’d be taking some time off from blogging in order to focus on revising the manuscript for our forthcoming book on Pietism… • …then went right ahead and wrote a reflection on why I (eventually) signed the Confessing Faculty statement… • …and paid tribute to one of my favorite Pietists, Glen Wiberg (1925-2017). … 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
This 4th of July weekend I’m feeling more patriotic than I have in years, thanks to two speeches by Pres. Obama. First, his speech this past March at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Obama remembered the civil right activists who fifty years earlier had been brutally attacked during their peaceful march to Montgomery: As … More Patriotism, Love, and Grace: An Independence Day Meditation
In the spirit of my fellow historian-blogger John Fea’s annual “spring membership drive,” I’d like to make an intentional effort this week to encourage readers to give back to this blog by sharing their opinions. While I appreciate everyone who reads The Pietist Schoolman, it’s rare for any post to get more than a single comment. Let’s see if … More Comment Drive: What’s the Most Historically Accurate Movie?
Here… • Our department’s weekly webisode series, Past & Presence, premiered on Wednesday. (Despite the best attempts of the Conference on Faith and History Facebook page to put us in competition, John Fea was gracious enough to plug our webisodes at his blog. And congrats to John for his Why Study History? getting such prominent attention from the American Historical Association!) • … More That Was The Week That Was
Having started the week by sharing an article questioning whether we really ever learn “lessons” from the past, let me close the week by considering another way that Americans commonly try to make the past useful: by deploying it as a rhetorical weapon in the most heated debates of the present day. Two versions of this come up a lot. … More The Wrong Side of History
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
For years after King’s death, many white Christians continued to eye him with suspicion, even as families like mine proudly displayed his portrait on our walls. Today, in an era when all fifty U.S. states now observe the King holiday and a resplendent monument to the man stands in our nation’s capital, it’s difficult to … More Birmingham Revolution: How to Silence a Prophetic Voice
