This week I questioned my own skepticism about miraculous healing. Elsewhere: • Half of the country’s Christian congregations have 65 or fewer attenders — half what the attendance level was at the start of the century. • Meanwhile, not quite half of Americans have watched church online during the COVID pandemic — and one-third of them don’t normally … More That Was The Week That Was
On this week’s special episode of The 252 (“Sports talk radio as done by academics”), Chris, Sam, and I talked about baseball’s cheating scandal and the Mennonite college graduate who’s making history at the Super Bowl. But mostly, this episode exists for the sake of a long interview we recorded with Greg Jennings, a two-time Pro Bowl … More Wednesday’s Podcast: Inside the Life of an NFL Player
Today I’m happy to share a guest post from Anthony Minnema, assistant professor of history at Samford University. A specialist in Muslim-Christian relations during the Middle Ages, Tony studied at Calvin College and the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and was a Lilly Graduate Fellow at Valparaiso University before coming to Samford. In this post, he responds … More What About a Farm? (Anthony Minnema)
Briefly this morning, let me recommend a new Patheos blog called Digital Wisdom. Though written by multiple authors, I know it best via Michael Paulus, the university librarian at Seattle Pacific University who was one of my hosts when I spoke at SPU’s faculty retreat last fall. “Within the last thirty years,” he wrote in the … More Digital Wisdom: A New Blog on Technology and Theology
When I turned in my spring grades in May, I worked at the country’s 451st best university. But when I return from sabbatical next year, I’ll be teaching courses at the country’s 82nd best university. No, I’m not changing jobs. But Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota jumped all the way into the top 100 in the most recent … More So I Guess I Work for One of the Top 100 Universities in the Country
“What’s wrong with Christianity in 2016?” Yikes. As I wrote here last week, I’ve been dreading this question since we decided that our book on “Pietism and the Future of Christianity” would mirror the structure of Philipp Spener’s Pia Desideria, whose first major section is a “Conspectus of Corrupt Conditions in the Church.” As I mused … More Thursday’s Podcast: What’s Wrong?
According to WordPress, this is my 1000th post at The Pietist Schoolman. Now, I know bloggers who publish that much every year (or even more often than that), but their posts tend to consist of long quotations from other sources with some brief commentary. Since mine are most often original essays of 1000-1500 words, the fact that I’ve … More Post #1000… and a Change of Blogging Pace
1/22/14 – The newest channel over at Patheos is Mission:Work, “a place where conversation happens about work and faith.” Guided by senior editor Chris Armstrong, it encompasses multiple blogs offering Christian reflections on work and workplaces, calling, economics, and other topics that evangelicals — in my experience — have tended to neglect. Check it out!
Here… • When the week started, did I think that I’d writing about the spiritual implications of birdwatching? No. By Thursday afternoon had I written the phrase “orni-theological musing“? Yes. Blogging is weird. • Jared Burkholder introduced us to the Moravian branch of the Pietist family tree. I’m hoping for a sequel in which he … More That Was The Week That Was
Well, my vow not to parse any more college rankings lasted about five weeks. Right up until… wait for it… Now. Last week the New York Times highlighted a website called PayScale.com, which released its annual ranking of just over a thousand American colleges and universities. Here’s the hook: PayScale doesn’t look at reputation (U.S. News) … More Well-Paid (or Meaningful) Work as a Measure of Higher Education
The Pietist Schoolman 