Last week on College for Christians, we focused on the first word in our title and surveyed the wide array of thousands of American postsecondary institutions enrolling millions of students. This week, we put the pieces of our title together and look at the variety of ways that American Christians have approached higher education. That … More The Variety of Christian Colleges
The latest review of Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America’s Most Infamous Pilot is also one of the most generous: Any Lindbergh biographer faces a challenge: to tell the truth about the past, both the good and the bad, with both empathy and unflinching honesty. Christopher Gehrz, a history professor at Bethel University in … More The Christian Century Reviews My Lindbergh Bio
If only because it means that I can do more than talk about Charles Lindbergh, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be teaching a four-week adult class on an even more contentious topic: the meaning of the word “evangelical.” Even better, it’s being taught at the church I attended for fifteen years: Salem Covenant in … More My Upcoming Adult Class on Evangelicalism
This week I tried to excite incoming Christian college students about academics, announced my participation in an ecumenical conversation about Jesus (more on that here next week), launched a launch team for my next book (two or three spots still open!), recorded a podcast about the politics of the Olympics, and asked whether it’s possible … More That Was The Week That Was
I was out of town over the weekend at one of my daughter’s softball tournaments, so I didn’t get a chance to curate my usual set of interesting links. If I had, I’m sure several of them would have collected around a surprising finding from the Public Religion Research Institute. Its 2020 Census of American … More Is Mainline Protestantism Actually Growing?
I know this title sounds absurd. It certainly did to many people in my feed when Union Seminary tweeted this on Tuesday: Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too … More Should Christians Confess Sins to Plants?
This week I wrote about the religious history of lumberjacks, nominated the best years in sports history, and suggested seven questions that Christian colleges should ask potential presidents. Elsewhere: • It was an impressively eclectic week at The Anxious Bench. In David Swartz’s post on the faith(s) of a popular game show host and John Turner’s review … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • If you’ve been waiting six years for me to blog about Wonder Woman… well, this was your lucky week. • In addition to my own piece for Christianity Today, I shared a few links to other reflections on Memorial Day. • And I wrote a sequel to last week’s Mike Pence post, this one … More That Was The Week That Was
“Can liberal Christianity be saved?“, asked New York Times columnist Ross Douthat a few days ago. He was virtually certain that the answer was No, based on what he saw as the fifty-year decline of denominations like The Episcopal Church (TEC). The conservative Catholic Douthat’s thesis was echoed by at least two commentators with connections to Episcopalianism: … More “The ones that should go”: One Liberal Protestant Explanation for Mainline Decline
The Pietist Schoolman 