Here… • It’s been twenty years this fall since I started working on my doctorate at one of the universities that David Barton thinks is brainwashing Christian historians. He’s wrong, but it was worth thinking about how grad school does form its students. • I shared three alternatives for evangelicals looking to rethink how they engage with the … More That Was The Week That Was
For the first half of my fall sabbatical in Virginia, my primary goal is to finish the manuscript for the book I’m writing with Mark Pattie: Hope for Better Times: Pietism and the Future of Christianity, which should come out from InterVarsity Press next year. Mark is primarily responsible for writing the chapter on how Pietists read the … More “We read Scripture to do God’s Word”
Last week my Anxious Bench colleague John Turner drew our attention to America’s Public Bible, a new project by Lincoln Mullen. A leading digital historian who works (like John) at George Mason University, Lincoln describes APB in this way: America’s Public Bible uncovers the presence of biblical quotations in the nearly 11 million newspaper pages in the Library of Congress’s … More Following Up: Micah 6:8 in American Rhetoric
As I begin work on a book with one of its pastors about its theological heritage, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Evangelical Covenant Church. So with delegates from its congregations gathering in Phoenix, Arizona for our denomination’s annual meeting, I thought I’d share a few quotations from a few of my favorite Covenanters, clustered around our denomination’s … More Glad Hearts: Some of My Favorite Voices from the Covenant Church
Here… • No, the liberal arts are not synonymous with “top liberal arts colleges.” • What is it that Christian historians do? I tried to boil it down to a few fundamental principles. • If you’d be interested in hearing Efrem Smith, Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom, Christian Collins Winn, and others talk about Pietism, save the date of December … More That Was The Week That Was
Today Mark, Sam, and I return from our spring break with the first of six proposals for how a revival of the Pietist ethos can benefit Christianity early in the 21st century. Continuing to parallel the structure of Pia Desideria (1675), we joined Philipp Jakob Spener in urging greater attentiveness to Scripture: Thought should be given to a more … More Thursday’s Podcast: A Greater Attentiveness to Scripture
In the course of trying to convince evangelicals that they might actually be Pietists, yesterday I argued again that the beginning of Christian witness is the unity of the church. With Jesus, we ought to pray that his followers “may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them … More Christian Unity Is a Task for Christian Formation
There are few terms more debated than “evangelical,” and never more so than during this election cycle, when Donald Trump’s ability to attract a significant share of self-identified evangelicals has caused enormous consternation among evangelical leaders and intellectuals. I doubt that last night’s primary results will do much to change that dynamic. Florida senator Marco … More Done with “Evangelical”? Maybe You Should Try “Pietist”
Here… • Two big, related announcements: not only has InterVarsity Press agreed to publish my next book on Pietism, but my co-author and I will be thinking aloud about each chapter when the second season of The Pietist Schoolman Podcast debuts next month. • Can a historian be both truthful and hopeful? • I wasn’t quite buying the notion that … More That Was The Week That Was
The current issue of Christianity Today features an interesting interview with Christopher Wright, international ministries director for Langham Partnership International and author of the newest entry in IVP Academic’s “The Bible Speaks Today” series: The Message of Lamentations: Honest to God. Twice in the magazine’s introduction Lamentations is described as one of the Bible’s “most neglected” books, a theme that … More What Are the Most Neglected Books in the Bible?
The Pietist Schoolman 