So much for the idea that Americans don’t care about their past. One of the hashtags trending today on Twitter complained about the dangers of #ErasingHistory: Is it wrong if I watch these morons kicking a statue & wish they'd break a toe or two? đ#HeritageNotHate#DurhamNC#Durham#ErasingHistory https://t.co/LRGqDYXml6 — đ¸ RedPills4All đşđ¸ (@RedPills4All171) August 15, 2017 … More How History Is Actually Erased
âThis is not my country.â Thatâs what I wanted to believe yesterday, as I stumbled back from a week-long vacation in the Rocky Mountains into the ugly events transpiring in Charlottesville, Virginia. Having intentionally tried to avoid the news in order to savor time with my family, it was bewildering to check social media in … More On Charlottesville: “This Is Not My Country”
Thanks to a hectic week, I only had a chance to share a tribute to my grandfather and to announce the Amazon Prime premiere of a new documentary on Pietism. I’ll be back to my usual blogging pace next week, but in the meantime, here are a few other links from around the blogosphere: ⢠… More That Was The Week That Was
Greetings from Covenant Pines Bible Camp in beautiful northern Minnesota. Since I’m on retreat with other members of our congregation, I probably shouldn’t even have a laptop and wifi, but since I do… a few links from this blog and others: Here… â˘Â The real “crisis in authority” in evangelicalism is that women don’t have authority in evangelicalism. â˘Â You … More That Was The Week That Was
I hope I don’t sound too much like our president when I insist that we had a great turnout Sunday morning for the start of my new class at Salem Covenant Church, on “The Church and the Wars of the 20th Century.” To set the table, I proposed some big questions that will run through our narrative, none … More Unexpected Sites of Christian Pacifism
The third of the three short meditations I contributed to a Hanging of the Greens service last month. Merry Christmas to you all! It was December 1863, and Americaâs bloody Civil War had entered its third winter. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was grieving: two years before, his wife had died in a fire; less … More The Ringing of Bells: A Christmas Meditation
I’ve got a new post up today at The Anxious Bench, on the presence of three virtues in Abraham Lincoln’s original 1863 proclamation of a national day of thanksgiving. But that’s all the blogging I plan to do this week. Enjoy your Thanksgiving, and we’ll hope to see you back here next week, when I plan posts on teaching, academic … More Happy Thanksgiving!
Earlier this week I started a three-part series at The Anxious Bench on the challenges of writing biographies. I’m writing these posts without any real knowledge of what biographers go through, having never written a book of that sort. But like many historians who have reached mid-career, I’m contemplating such a project, reading more examples of it than usual, and starting … More My New Series on Writing Biography
Here… â˘Â I’m mostly past worrying about pageviews, but if you missed my observations about the past and politics in southwestern Virginia… I do think it deserves more attention than it got. ⢠But more importantly, Andy Crouch’s Trump editorial in Christianity Today got a huge readership. ⢠Reader Sean O’Neil suggested that Christian intellectuals are actually planting some important seeds during … More That Was The Week That Was
I had intended to write a series of these “dispatches,” and I still might have one or two more things to add before we head back to Minnesota. But for now, I put together a few observations about our time in one of the most strongly pro-Trump parts of the country. For my fall sabbatical, my … More Dispatches from Trump Country: The Past and Politics
The Pietist Schoolman 