I may play the role, but I’m not a historian of Christianity, or any other religion. I edit books, write articles, give papers, and blog about Pietism, and I teach courses on Christianity and Western Culture and The Reformations, but my graduate education was overseen by this guy and this guy; I somehow never took … More Matthew Bowman’s The Mormon People
I’m afraid that fundamentalism didn’t come off so well at our “Pietism and Christian Colleges” session this past Saturday at the Conference on Faith and History. Both in Jared Burkholder’s paper on Pietism and scholarly virtues and Kurt Peterson’s on the Evangelical Covenant Church in the 1950s, fundamentalism showed its least attractive face: suspicious, uncharitable, … More You Can’t Spell Fundamentalism without Fun
Before I get on a plane back to the Twin Cities, let me share some thoughts on the Saturday sessions from the 2012 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History, plus some more general observations: The early session featured three papers on “Christology in History: Three Perspectives from the Trenches.” All took off from … More Thoughts from CFH 2012: Saturday
Today: a second reflection inspired by Lauren Winner’s Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Read the first here. As you might guess from the title, Lauren Winner spends plenty of time alone with her thoughts in Still, but it doesn’t usually take more than a page or two before a relative or friend or pastor … More Reflections on Lauren Winner’s Still: The Potluck Church
At the end of June, Jared Burkholder had an interesting post over at The Hermeneutic Circle, in which he reflected on the challenge of doing institutional histories. Specifically, the challenge of editing a new history of Grace College and Seminary with fellow Grace history professor Mark Norris. Especially as they reached the chapter dealing with … More Between Commemoration and Criticism: The Challenge of Institutional History
As I suggested in my weekly recap last Saturday, I’ve had a hard time convincing myself to write a second post about the man who committed the massacre in Norway last month: Anders Behring Breivik. Intending to analyze his targeting of “cultural Marxists” in addition to Muslims, I attempted to read through parts of Breivik’s … More Norway: “A Christian Fundamentalist”
For the third part of my series on (neo)Anabaptist critiques of Pietism, I’d like to pause, sum up the points of criticism, and invite readers’ responses before moving on. In the first entry in the series, we reviewed Harold Bender’s “Anabaptist Vision” speech, then continued in part 2 with the “Friedmann thesis” promulgated by Robert … More Taking Stock: Anabaptist Critiques of Pietism
The Pietist Schoolman 