This week I celebrated two magisterial Protestant traditions, reported from a nephew’s baptism, and learned about institutional history from Wheaton College. Elsewhere:
• Why has the abortion rate increased since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade?
• This year marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Congress tightly restricting immigration — legislation that “functioned as an instrument of religious restriction and exclusion.”
• To the list of things I appreciate about the Reformed tradition, I’ll add the scholarship and teaching of scholars like Kristin Du Mez — and several of the guests in her Calvin University seminar on evangelicalism.
• Meanwhile, post-evangelicals are beginning to organize.
• “Nothing in particular” doesn’t just describe disengagement from religion.
• If you didn’t believe a historian’s recommendation of Shirley Mullen’s Courageous Middle book, consider this cultural anthropologist’s testimonial.
• One of my favorite Lutheran writers started a unique new call, serving a Minneapolis congregation as both visitation pastor and public theologian.
• Spirituality isn’t morality; it’s “in the underground, the unseen root system where God works.”
• “A church that’s an echo chamber fails to reckon with the ways God’s Spirit works deep and wide across the globe,” wrote a theologian who disagrees with her church’s limitations on women in ministry. “But learning to love others who see the world differently takes work—especially in a society that sorts us out based on our natural affinities.”
(She was writing in Christianity Today. But a far more progressive Christian periodical also made the case “that when we center our shared identity in Christ — notwithstanding our differences — we can generate trust and build relationships that bear real fruit, increasing cooperation within the church to address challenges in the world.”)
• With sexuality and other issues still dividing what’s left of the denomination, the United Methodist Church voted to start breaking into four world regions.
• That last article courtesy of National Public Radio… which has been hemorrhaging listeners since COVID.
• A third of college-aged students feel uncomfortable sharing their political views on campus — up from 13% in 2015.
• John Hawthorne offered typically helpful perspective on the college protests that have garnered so much media attention this week.
• I’m glad that Bethel has done away with the tradition of paying someone to bloviate at our commencement ceremonies. But if you need to bring in such a speaker, please don’t hire a robot.
• Same goes for calling baseball games.