Author and activist Shane Claiborne calls on Christians to “practice resurrection” and get in the way of death. Here’s how Christian historians do just that. … More To Be a Historian Is To Practice Resurrection
Chris and Sam riff on trump, sabbath, nostalgia, and three other words. … More Nothing Rhymes with Gehrz (Episode 2)
This year our church’s Maundy Thursday service began with each person at our table drawing from a bag the name of a disciple. For the rest of the service, we’d then try to imagine the story from the point of view of that follower of Jesus. My son, for example, drew Simon the Zealot. Fittingly, I … More Pilate’s Holy Saturday
I hadn’t realized how much I would miss Glen Wiberg until halfway through worship last Sunday at Salem. As soon as I opened the bulletin and saw a Lina Sandell song listed as the pulpit hymn, I knew my voice would tighten. But the tears began to flow as I looked over to Glen’s former spot in … More “Plotting the Resurrection”: Final Thoughts on Glen Wiberg
“The [Pietistic] tradition still lives,” theologian John Weborg once reassured his friend, Glen Wiberg. “But to new people the word Pietism is an unknown word. Pietism is the way the pastor does things.” So while I appreciate having the chance to write a book on Pietism with my pastor, I wish that anyone interested in Pietism could just spend … More “Pietism is the way the pastor does things”: Glen Wiberg (1925-2017)
If you couldn’t attend my lecture last week in Chicago, it’s now streaming online via North Park University. Entitled “The Pietist Option for (Current and Former) Evangelicals,” the talk suggested how Pietism might renew evangelicalism — by way of “a Pietist gloss” on the familiar evangelical themes of biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism. Click here to watch the … More Now Streaming: My Talk on “The Pietist Option for Evangelicals”
Our friend Stacey Hunter Hecht died a year ago today. I promise this won’t become an annual tradition, but this once, I thought I’d repost what I wrote about her. In the first four months of this year, three of my closest kith and kin were diagnosed with breast cancer. As we near the end of … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: On Friendship
Let me talk to pastors for a moment. (Though their congregants might want to listen in.) Sisters and brothers – Now that candidate Trump has become president-elect Trump, I know that many of you are struggling with how you’re going to preach tomorrow morning. Unsettled yourselves, you know that you’ll soon look out at the expectant faces of people feeling … More “Tell It Like It Is”: How Pastors Can Respond to Election Day
A second parable I’ve been thinking about today: The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full … More Parables: Seeds
Here… • Fortunately, blog readership plummets during Easter weekend, but in case you want to revisit them, I did post reflections on the vigil of Holy Saturday and the “resurrection sunset” of Easter evening. • Lesson learned: any supposed list of “indispensable Christian academic Twitter users” is itself quite dispensable. (Though you could do worse than to follow these seven.) … More That Was The Week That Was
