Until he died last night, I had no idea that horror film director Wes Craven had graduated from Wheaton College. (He discussed his fundamentalist Baptist upbringing and his decision to flee from it in a 2011 interview with the New York Times Magazine.) Of course, this got me wondering: who else would I be surprised to learn … More Who Are the Most Surprising Christian College Alumni?
The last episode of The Late Show with David Letterman aired last night — just over twenty-two years and four thousand episodes after I watched its debut in the middle of a hurricane warning, on my first evening as a college student in Virginia. I can’t really improve on all the commentary recognizing the significance of my all-time favorite TV personality to … More What Does It Mean to Be Midwestern? (A Post-Letterman Question)
A very busy week at this blog and others. Let’s dive in! Here… • I’m grateful to Jared Burkholder, for suggesting a moratorium on attempts to identify “true” Islam and for helping to make possible my upcoming visit to Grace College. • There was lots of good conversation around one of the biggest stories in … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • As we neared the end of our J-term sprint through the history of World War II and my students heard from a Holocaust survivor, I returned to my Epiphany theme of “thick darkness.” • Lots of MLK Day posts claiming to reclaim some lost or neglected dimension of MLK: e.g., that he was … More That Was The Week That Was
It’s been almost a year — let’s resume my series blogging alphabetically through a selection of some of my favorite albums. There was a time when the album was as much the dominion of comedians as musicians. Jokesmiths won two of the first five Album of the Year awards at the Grammys: Bob Newhart in … More Albums A to Z: Monty Python Sings
Here • The first in a series of brief reflections inspired by Lauren Winner’s Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis focused on her skill as a writer (skill not often found among those of us trained to write academic history). • Why it’s so hard to do institutional histories when you’re part of the institution … More That Was The Week That Was
The Pietist Schoolman 