This week I tried to explain why Pietists are irenic, why a famously Christian king was more like Goliath than David, and what I most appreciated about the region of Europe I just toured. Elsewhere:
• A new religion newsletter from The Dispatch debuted with Karen Swallow Prior’s critique of Christian nationalism.
• In a time when many congregations are facing declining numbers and resources, a Christian ethicist asked what would happen “if we organized our church lives around an expectation of scarcity instead of an assumption of plenty?”
• Some advice from Philip Jenkins on the historical difference between orthodoxy and heresy: “when you read church history, always remember that those -ites and -ists and -ians might well have ended up being judged very differently, and more positively.”
• The latest development in the human sexuality debate within the Christian Reformed Church felt all too familiar to this Evangelical Covenanter.
• And now we’ll see what happens to dissenting faculty at Calvin University.
• More bad news from the world of Christian higher education: Eastern Nazarene College (above) looks to be closing, and the Michigan campus of Concordia University is eliminating most of its in-person academic programs.
• Eastern Nazarene’s announcement is particularly sad, as my go-to expert on Nazarene/Wesleyan education explained.
Finally, it was a week when even I couldn’t avoid politics…
• I rarely read Tom Friedman anymore, but his take on Thursday night’s presidential debate sounded right to me: “Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election. And Donald Trump, a malicious man and a petty president, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
• Not that it’d be easy to replace an incumbent at this point in the race. But among the many other reasons not to desire a second Trump presidency, I want an American leader who doesn’t demonize immigrants.
• And one who takes climate change seriously.
• This post may make me sound like a progressive, but this centrist is simply looking for “the most effective approach to dealing with complex and ever-changing challenges.”
Maybe I should add “Chris Gehrz’s go-to expert” to the book bio!