Here…
• My family is looking for a new church in a different denomination.
• Is Civil War reenactment in decline?
• And I followed my department onto Instagram.
…There and Everywhere
• At The Anxious Bench, I gave away a free idea to any historian or biographer who wants to write a more religiously-attuned version of my daughter’s current favorite book.
• It’s almost becoming cliché to find former churches and synagogues converted into bars, restaurants, shops, and condos. But some are turning into, well, churches and synagogues.
• Maybe it’s just that I’m teaching my Cold War class again and am thinking ahead to the week we’ll do on the 1980s, but reading this newly unearthed letter from a surprisingly devout Ronald Reagan to his dying father-in-law, an atheist, was a genuinely moving experience.
• Did you ever meet someone who inherited a family business but really should have been doing something else with their life? Meet Franklin Graham.
• Is 2 John addressed to a woman who held authority in the Early Church?
• “Remarkably,” wrote one Christian neuroscientist, “neuroscience tells us three things about the mind: the mind is metaphysically simple, the intellect and will are immaterial, and free will is real.”
• “If Germany is to be praised” for trying to come to terms with its Nazi past, “it is precisely because its history is ever-present, its struggle ongoing, and not because that history has been overcome.”
• Long, thoughtful essay on the challenges of American patriotism at The American Conservative: “What sentimental lasso is big enough to gather a solid us from such varied material? Well, the big one, maybe: we’re all human. But that’s the problem: the basic human things I share with my fellow Americans, I share with pretty much everyone.”
