Greetings from the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan! After a terrific couple days at the Conference on Faith and History, I’m waiting for my flight home and thought I’d share a few of the pieces I’ve been reading the last seven days: • With all that’s been going on at my … More That Was The Week That Was
Let me suspend my Lenten hiatus just long enough to share the text of the sermon I delivered yesterday at Salem Covenant Church in New Brighton, Minnesota. It was the fourth in a “Path to Renewal” series inspired by The Pietist Option: Hope for the Renewal of Christianity, with my co-author — and Salem’s senior pastor … More The Path to Renewal: Be a Priest! (John 2:13-22)
“[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
On Friday, President Trump told participants in the Values Voter Summit that “We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values.” Now, critics found it hard to take the “Judeo” part seriously, given that Trump immediately followed that line with another version of his pledge to restore “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.” And it’s … More The Anti-Fascist Origins of “Judeo-Christian Values”
Here… • In some ways it’s not strong enough, in other ways it’s too strong, but it’s what I think about the Nashville Statement. (For another perspective… a British evangelical tried to explain why he signed the Nashville Statement, even though he regarded it as “far from perfect” and worried that its credibility was damaged.) … More That Was The Week That Was
The rest of this summer our pastors are going preach on what David’s life teaches us about leadership. Jonna got things started this past Sunday with a fine meditation on how God, when he chose David to be anointed as king, looks beyond the superficial to see the heart. (A good fit with the Tom … More The Violence of God
While I didn’t do a lot of blogging during my travel course in Europe, I did try to keep up on my newsfeed. So as we near the end of January, I’ll share a couple of links wraps covering the whole month. I’ll come back to history and education tomorrow, but let’s start with the first overarching topic … More That Was The Month That Was: Christianity
Having offered some unsolicited homiletic advice last Saturday, I thought today I might share a rare example of my own preaching: a sermon I delivered last month in Denver, to set up a four-class series at Covenant Village of Colorado on the history of Christians engaging with the wider culture. For the Sunday evening vespers service, I meditated … More Habitation and Homelessness: My Sermon on Citizenship
One way or another, it’s clear that white evangelical support for Donald Trump is the biggest religion-and-politics story to come out of the election. But as a former student pointed out to me yesterday, that’s not the only Christian group that might have some soul-searching to do. Now, this is preliminary analysis of exit polls, and such … More It’s Not Just Evangelicals…
Here… • My favorite Anxious Bench post so far: a historical and personal reflection on Warner Sallman’s painting Head of Christ. (Though, not surprisingly, writing a post questioning a depiction of Jesus as white brought out the worst in Patheos commenters…) • Another fellow Covenanter, my co-author Mark Pattie, shared a sneak peek at his chapter on the Bible … More That Was The Week That Was
