Why is Christmas the shortest season in the Christian calendar? I think it’s partly because of a relative silence in the New Testament. The season that starts with the birth of Christ would naturally be the time to learn about the years immediately following Nativity, but the Bible says almost nothing about Jesus’ childhood, adolescence, … More Twelve Days: Jesus’ Sisters and Brothers
Earlier this month I attended the memorial service for Dr. Jim Johnson, who spent thirty years teaching U.S. history at Bethel. Jim retired about a decade before I arrived, and we’d only met a handful of times over the years. So I felt a bit like an interloper in a room full of his closest … More A Funeral and Four Thanksgivings
Fifteen years ago this month, I walked into Salem Covenant Church in New Brighton, Minnesota. Save for a sabbatical in Virginia in 2016, I’ve been at Salem ever since. Not surprisingly, that congregation and its larger denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church, have been regular topics here at The Pietist Schoolman. So I think I ought to … More Why My Family Is Changing Churches (and Denominations)
Thanks to Pastor Doug Bixby, for effectively switching places with me yesterday: while he was back in my hometown participating in the annual meeting of the Covenant Church, I had the chance to preach and teach at the church he serves in Attleboro, Massachusetts. (And thanks to their associate pastor, Chris Wall, for being such … More Stories of Hope: Joseph… and Judah
It was a particularly emotional All Saints’ Sunday for me. Not only did I think of Glen Wiberg as we gathered in the sanctuary where he preached and worshipped for so many years, but I carried a candle in memory of my Grandpa Peterson, just a day after we’d gathered at the family farm to … More On Saying Farewell to a Family Farm
A tribute to my grandfather, who died Saturday night at age 94, leaving behind a legacy of faith, hope, and love. … More Grandpa Peterson
God, according to the Bible, “has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecc 3:11). I try to keep this wisdom in mind, as a scholar who is too prone to assume that his discipline has a monopoly on human … More In Which a Historian Learns to Embrace Nostalgia…
“Historians aren’t supposed to write hagiography,” I wrote one Father’s Day, “but what can I say: [my] Dad is the most brilliant, hard-working man that I know, utterly committed to serving others with his gifts, time, energy, and ample vision.” Midway through a career in which he had started a pediatric intensive care unit, won teaching awards … More Yet Another Reason My Dad Is a Great Guy
One more parable, also from Mark 4: Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. … More Parables: Roots
Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest And let these gifts to us be blessed Amen Today I’m happy to continue my new Anxious Bench series — on Christian writings that don’t take the form of books — by reflecting on the table grace that I’ve known all my life and am now teaching my children. Here’s an … More Beyond Books: “Come, Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest”
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