4/13/12 – Hot off the press from Wipf & Stock, publisher of our The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, is another book about an “impulse” in Christianity. Edited by Jared S. Burkholder and David C. Cramer, The Activist Impulse: Essays on the Intersection of Evangelicalism and Anabaptism brings together chapters by John Roth, Steven Nolt, John … More The Activist Impulse
In the newest issue of the Baptist Pietist Clarion, I was especially struck by Glen Scorgie‘s article, “Religion of the Heart: The Enduring Value of Pietism,” in which he asks “whether Pietism should still matter to the Baptist General Conference—to Converge Worldwide.” Even beyond that particular denomination, I think it’s a valuable question for several churches … More Glen Scorgie: Why Pietism Still Matters
For someone who both works in a Christian university and researches the history and theory of Christian higher education, it’s been exciting to see a national publication make that model of formation the cover story of an issue, as Christianity Today has done for March. I already posted a brief mention of the CT article … More Educating for Wisdom
At the end of last week, I had students in my Human Rights in International History course read and respond to an article by Joel A. Nichols, “Evangelicals and Human Rights: The Continuing Ambivalence of Evangelical Christians’ Support for Human Rights” (published in the Journal of Law & Religion in 2009). Nichols teaches law at … More Are Evangelicals Ambivalent about Human Rights?
I was struck at the end of last week by a pair of quite different articles that shared two themes: church growth and decline, and conclusions relating those trends to how political or apolitical a church is. First, historian Thomas Kidd’s Patheos column on “The Rise and Fall of American Methodism.” Kidd begins by recapping … More Apolitical Churches
Earlier this week I got a nice comment from Jeff Hochstetler, a student at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, who asked a great question: Do you think that for a Pietistic vision to be successful, it must be rooted in institutional expressions, as the Anabaptist vision was/is? Jeff had been reading my summer 2011 series on … More Where Would a Pietist Vision Come From?
Here • Timothy Garton Ash’s comments on the new French genocide denial law got me wondering what you all think about the limits of free speech and historical inquiry. (Thanks to Seth Rima — one of my former students, coincidentally interviewed this week at our department blog! — for sharing his thoughts.) • My January … More That Was The Week That Was
Today’s post is the second in a new, occasional series on the role of Pietism in the history of Bethel University and its parent denomination, the Baptist General Conference (now going by its “missional name”: Converge Worldwide). Rather than give my own take on these topics, I’m going to summarize the work of some earlier … More Pietism, the BGC, and Bethel University: G.W. Carlson
A relatively quiet week for The Pietist Schoolman (grading season, doncha know) was more than offset by some excellent blogging elsewhere. Here I’ve always wanted to write about my favorite punctuation mark — but to get to do that and respond to a New York Times op-ed piece on belief in God at the same … More That Was The Week That Was
Feels like the blog’s been a little too focused on history of late, so I’m dwelling a bit more on current events and popular culture this week. And, at the risk of my least favorite of the four major professional team sports showing up in this blog’s tag cloud, that attitude seems to beg a … More Tebow
The Pietist Schoolman 