Ernest Stoeffler was a scholar who devoted his life to the study of pietism in its many forms: Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Moravian, Puritan, Wesleyan, and the like. His magnum opus, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism, still stands as the best overall survey of pietism as an international movement. Stoeffler not only chronicled the various manifestations […]
Some folks in Kentucky are planning to build a theme park featuring what they will advertise as an exact replica of Noah’s Ark. The story is in the news these days, because the state government is encouraging the project by offering tax breaks to the planners. I’m not going to address that controversy. But I am interested in how...
Christianity Today has a fine tribute to Vernon Grounds (click here to read it). He was a person who had a significant influence on my life, so I will add some personal thoughts here.
The influence actually started quite early in my childhood. Vernon Grounds was a household name in my early spiritual environs as a...
Lisa Miller wrote a nice Newsweek column recently on the subject of humility—go here to read it.
She noted the frequency with which political leaders, right after the recent election results came in, spoke about being “humbled”—either about winning or, in President Obama’s case, by the “shellacking” his party experienced.
In exploring the role of...
I have been hearing quite a bit these days in evangelical circles about the need to “engage culture.” Someone even introduced me recently to an audience as an evangelical who advocates “cultural engagement.” I don’t have any objection to that characterization, as long as we are clear about what we mean by “engage.”
The word has two very different popular...
I have written before about Halloween. I actually like the yearly event. This goes against the grain of some Christian views about the subject these days. I’m glad my parents—themselves not known for their love of “worldly” things—did not get into an anti-Halloween way of thinking. Indeed, they would host the teenagers from church for a Halloween party: ghosts,...
Read a recent posting of mine on this topic here, on Duke Divinity School’s Faith & Leadership blog.
There is trouble at Harry & David’s. The Oregon company, which began by selling pears and now does a major mail-order business with its “fruit-of-the-month” offerings, Moose Munch popcorn, and related products, has recently experienced another senior management change. This time the new CEO has broken tradition by choosing to live in Atlanta rather than in the company’s hometown...
Pope Benedict is getting ready to visit England. He will officiate at a beatification ceremony—the step that precedes the elevation of the beatified person to sainthood status. This pope has regularly avoided participating in these ceremonies. In this case, though, the candidate for sainthood is John Henry Newman, the well-known nineteenth-century theologian and churchman who famously left the Anglican...
Glenn Beck is getting mixed theological reviews from evangelicals. Some of them have expressed pleasant surprise at how “Christian” he has been sounding. Richard Land went so far as to say, according to the Washington Post, that Beck in his recent speech at the Washington rally “sounded like Billy Graham.” But one of Land’s fellow Southern Baptist theologians, Russell...
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