Here… • I didn’t dislike the new college rankings from MONEY magazine, but as I considered how Bethel and other Christian colleges fared, I remained convinced that “no system that needs to rank public institutions and avowedly secular private ones is going to properly assess the value of Christian colleges and universities.” • We reached the 100th anniversary of the … More That Was The Week That Was
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
So what’s this small but fast-growing denomination called the Evangelical Covenant Church? When I asked Facebook friends from the Covenant to suggest a sentence or two, I received several suggestions. I won’t repeat them all, but two common themes emerged. Most everyone appealed to figures or slogans from European history, and they described the Covenant as a group of people, … More What’s the Evangelical Covenant Church? “Missional Pietists”
Here… • Post #1000 seemed like the right time to announce that I’ll be slowing down my blogging pace: from daily to thrice-weekly (plus these links posts). • While I’m editing a book on The Pietist Vision for Higher Education, I haven’t really sought to articulate a Pietist model for Christian scholarship. I’ll take a shot … More That Was The Week That Was
For fundamentalist-leaning evangelicals, biblical inerrancy carries a ton of freight. It remains something of a shibboleth that 1) Provides a litmus test of orthodoxy, 2) verifies that one actually takes the Bible at face value, and 3) leads one to appropriate positions on issues ranging from origins to eschatology. With so much riding on this one … More Inerrancy and the “Lost World of Scripture”: An Interview with D. Brent Sandy
Ten minutes after I pressed “Publish” on Monday’s post about my struggle to find a way to blog well about the World Vision controversy, I found myself lecturing on the Catholic Reformation and Wars of Religion in Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class. While the fracturing of the Church into tens of thousands of denominations didn’t start or … More “That They May Be One”: Evangelical Unity after World Vision
Here… • We took a big step closer to the publication of The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education, so I celebrated by passing along the table of contents (with sample quotations from each piece). • I shared a Lenten meditation on the scriptural reminder that “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” • About … More That Was The Week That Was
This morning I’ll continue my preview of the conclusion to our forthcoming book, The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education: Forming Whole and Holy Persons, with a section considering how Pietists might respond to one popular “disruptive innovation” within higher ed. It resolves to the claim that gives the conclusion its title… Decision makers will need … More The Pietist University in the 21st Century (part 2)
Here… • As we neared the end of our J-term sprint through the history of World War II and my students heard from a Holocaust survivor, I returned to my Epiphany theme of “thick darkness.” • Lots of MLK Day posts claiming to reclaim some lost or neglected dimension of MLK: e.g., that he was … More That Was The Week That Was
What follows is as good a summation of what we do in Christian higher education as I know. It’s courtesy of my friend and frequent collaborator Sam Mulberry. Background: yesterday morning we held our semester-ending “synthesizing dialogue” with 140 students in Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class. It was my twentieth such conclusion, which still … More “Wounded and Healed”: A Benediction for Fall 2013 (Sam Mulberry)
The Pietist Schoolman 