Here… • My wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. The traditional gift is tin or aluminum, but I went with public praise and ecclesiological rumination instead. • We’ll be spending my sabbatical as a family in Virginia, where I can’t wait to attend the biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. • Some reflections on the Stanford … More That Was The Week That Was
Quick math: (presidential campaign season + sudden conversion story + observers of evangelicalism on summer break) x (social media) = ? That’s right: #iftrumpwereevangelical! If you’re on Twitter, agree that the best response to fear is laughter, and enjoy inside references to evangelical subculture, then you should click on the day’s fastest-trending hashtag. (Well, the most hilarious.) Among my favorites … More #iftrumpwereevangelical
It’s too nice a summer day in Minnesota to stay inside for too long, but here’s a shortened version of TWTWTW: Here… • Year six of The Pietist Schoolman started with me revisiting a Baptist debate over religious freedom in the 1960s. • I wasn’t a delegate this year, but my denomination’s annual meeting had me reading through the expanding, increasingly … More That Was The Week That Was
Republicans have garnered 77-78% of the evangelical vote in the last three major elections (2014, 2012, 2010). And it seems unlikely that Hillary Clinton will even reach the near-quarter of the evangelical vote that Barack Obama won in 2008. In April, Barna found that 81% of evangelicals had an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton — over … More Could Hillary Clinton Win a Significant Share of Evangelical Voters?
Here… • My first post at The Anxious Bench surveyed British Christian responses to next week’s “Brexit” referendum. • I knew that would be the topic this time last week. But I certainly didn’t know that my second Bench post would be the same day, that it would respond to a mass shooting, or that it would focus on … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • My big blogging announcement: I’ll be taking Tommy Kidd’s place as a weekly contributor to The Anxious Bench, the history blog at the Patheos Evangelical channel. Look for my first AB post in three days… • But that won’t stop me from blogging here… For example, about three of my favorite hymns that run counter to … More That Was The Week That Was
Because I work for a member institution of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) and study evangelical models of higher education, I occasionally need to be reminded that the CCCU represents only a fraction of the colleges and universities related to Christian churches. But after consecutive weekends in which I attended the seminary graduation … More The Humanities in Church-Related Higher Ed: A Broader View
I’m pretty sure the world has heard enough from me for now on the subject of the “crisis of the humanities” in Christian colleges. At the risk of overreaching, let me just add a few closing thoughts: First, that I appreciate the enormous response to the first two posts this week. They provoked some truly enlightening … More Final Thoughts on Evangelicalism and the Humanities: Rethinking How Christian Colleges Serve the Church
So what’s causing the decline of humanities disciplines in evangelical colleges? And why is it significant for those institutions’ constituencies? I think the answer to both questions may hinge on one word: fear. Now, I’m sure no single factor can explain why English, history, and philosophy accounted for only 5.5% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2014 by members of … More If There’s a Crisis of the Humanities in Christian Colleges, What Does It Tell Us about Evangelicalism?
So is Messiah College history professor John Fea correct that “Enrollments in humanities fields — history, philosophy, literature, theology — at evangelical colleges have experienced a precipitous decline over the last decade”? Last week I looked at my own institution to begin to offer an answer to that question. But I admitted that I didn’t … More Quantifying the Crisis in Humanities at Christian Colleges
The Pietist Schoolman 