This spring I’ve had the pleasure of teaching a group of adults who are planning a trip to Germany this fall. We started with a 90-minute tour of the Reformation last week and will conclude next Sunday with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but for the middle of our three-Sunday course, they were kind enough to let me … More If I Ever Led a Trip to Germany on the History of Pietism…
“[T]he most distinctive feature of history as an academic discipline,” I once argued, “is the relative paucity of the sources available. All we’ve got to go on are whatever artifacts survive the passing of time, and most of those sources erode. Past supporting preservation and archival efforts (including oral history projects), there’s not much historians can do … More Why We Can Remember the Holocaust
Yesterday I put my Modern Europe students through what’s become a pre-Thanksgiving ritual: watching the 2005 German movie, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, about the anti-Nazi student resistance group known as the White Rose. About, that is, the arrest, interrogation, and execution of its leaders, Sophie and Hans Scholl. Coming after our week on the Final Solution, it’s a wrenching … More The Prayers at the Heart of the White Rose
Here… • Guess which cluster of undergraduate majors produces the highest MCAT scores and med school acceptance rates. • The Pietist Option is a finalist for a readers’ choice award. Vote before December 3rd! • The penultimate episode of season 3 of The Pietist Schoolman Podcast surveyed Protestant Reformations apart from Luther’s. (We’ll take Thanksgiving week off, then wrap … More That Was The Week That Was
Is the Protestant principle of sola scriptura antithetical to Christian unity? That’s the argument of Catholic historian Brad Gregory, in his newest book: “Though it liberated evangelicals from the Roman Church, [“scripture alone”] also plunged them into the beginning of an unwanted Protestant pluralism. What lay behind these church-dividing disagreements was the very thing that had launched the Reformation … More Thursday’s Podcast: Sola Scriptura and Christian Unity
To mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, I spent the better part of today tweeting quotations, images, and links from the Reformation — covering each year from 1517 until Luther’s death in 1546. Luther and the German Reformation was my focus, but I also touched on the Swiss Reformation, the Radical Reformation, … More The Reformations, 1517-1546
A couple years ago our family went to southern Iowa for a reunion. Noticing that the nearest town was called Moravia, I decided to take a morning to drive around… and discovered several examples of Moravian, Brethren, and other Pietist groups that had settled in that part of America. That tour of “Pietist Iowa” ended … More Pietist “Communism”: The Amana Colonies
Thanks to a hectic week, I only had a chance to share a tribute to my grandfather and to announce the Amazon Prime premiere of a new documentary on Pietism. I’ll be back to my usual blogging pace next week, but in the meantime, here are a few other links from around the blogosphere: • … More That Was The Week That Was
Next month I’ll be teaching a four-week adult Sunday School at Elim Church in Minneapolis, on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. (If you can’t make it in June, I’ll be doing a six-week version of that topic starting late September at Calvary Church in Roseville, MN.) Now, I teach Luther et al. for a couple … More Alec Ryrie on “The Pietist Adventure”
Only time for a short set of links, since we’re getting ready to head up to Collegeville, Minnesota, where Bethel is taking on Macalester for a spot in the NCAA Division III baseball tournament. Here… • Perhaps historians like me have given nostalgia short shrift. • What do I do as a Christian blogger? Not teaching, … More That Was The Week That Was
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