Having spent a couple of posts last week unpacking Liberty University’s ambition (and the older one of Baylor University) to become “the Protestant Notre Dame” — and asking just what that meant, I’m surprised it took almost four days to see this comment appear: The question isn’t so much whether Liberty is a Protestant Notre Dame, … More Notre Dame and the Idea of the Catholic University
Here… • Is it a “farce” that Christian colleges are accredited by the federal government? Does faith make academic freedom impossible? Have at it, all sorts of terrific Christian scholars who don’t write for this blog! • Ed Gilbreath’s Birmingham Revolution got me thinking about the time that Martin Luther King, Jr. came closest to speaking at what’s now Bethel … More That Was The Week That Was
You wouldn’t expect a Baptist Pietist university in the American Midwest to be anything remotely like a hotbed for interest in the Middle Ages, but there’s been a mini-revival of matters medieval here at Bethel University. Leading the charge is church historian Chris Armstrong, who has branched out from his interests in Wesleyan and Holiness … More A Baptist Pietist University Gets Medieval
Here… • I learned several important blogging lessons last week. First, if you want to drastically increase your traffic, then write about Millennials and/or Rachel Held Evans… then do it again… • …or question whether New York really is all that important to the future of evangelicalism… • …or whether research is actually the “coin … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • July 1 is a big day for commemorating momentous battles: the Somme turned 97, and Gettysburg turned 150. • “Liberal arts” ≠ “the humanities” (at least, not them alone). • And in what’s already become a Pietist Schoolman tradition: a Bah, Humbug! kind of post for the 4th of July. …There and Everywhere … More That Was The Week That Was
A brief follow-up to Tuesday’s post, “The Humanities in Crisis, or Not“… Historian Ben Schmidt (by way of journalist Jordan Weissmann) argued that any fear that the humanities (history, philosophy, literature, languages) are in crisis should be tempered by the reality that (aside from an outlying boom that peaked in 1966) those disciplines have about … More Curriculum and the Health of the Humanities
When we walk out of a class, how do we know it was a good one? That question opened my friend David Williams’ talk at our “Pietist Idea of a Christian College” workshop last week. In the end, he concluded that it had little to do with content and everything to do with passion: there’s … More What Is Good Teaching?
Here… • A short week back from vacation began with the news of the passing of the leading historian of the Baptist General Conference (now Converge Worldwide)… • …then ended with the case of the South Carolina high school student who defied a school district policy and inserted the Lord’s Prayer into his commencement address. … More That Was The Week That Was
As part of a larger controversy boiling over at Cedarville University, its board of trustees last month voted to cut the school’s philosophy major, approving a recommendation made by the Academic Council earlier in January. Reporters and commentators tended to associate the elimination of philosophy (along with the resignation of the school’s president and vice … More Philosophy at Evangelical Colleges
For once, it was easy this week to know where to start my post-vacation ritual of sifting through stacks of new publications requiring some reading attention: with Roger Olson’s article in the Summer 2012 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review, “Pietism and Postmodernism: Points of Congeniality.” A refined version of the second of two lectures he … More Roger Olson on Pietism and Postmodernism
The Pietist Schoolman 