I’m back from an enjoyable tour of Scandinavia, still a bit jet-lagged but ready to get back to writing and other summer projects. While I’ve been away, here’s some of what I’ve been reading:
• “What, to the White American, is the 19th of June?”
paid tribute to Frederick Douglass in reflecting on the meaning of Juneteenth.• It turns out that there’s significant overlap between Black Lives Matter supporters and those who protested COVID lockdowns.
• How did we get to our current moment in American politics? While I think there’s a lot to Peter Wehner’s emphasis on “motivated ignorance” in the present, a new book points back to the Nineties.
(Or maybe it’s the Seventies.)
• Drawing on history to help answer contemporary legal questions presents problems for historians and Supreme Court justices alike.
• The only thing harder than writing an obituary of a complicated Christian is writing a biography of one. Historian-journalist Daniel Silliman does both tasks well — see his obit for Paul Pressler and his forthcoming bio of Richard Nixon.
• How do evangelicals grapple with their theological heroes’ participation in slavery? A comparative study of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley may offer a helpful model.
• “For all the talk there was about evangelicalism dying a few years back,” reported one sociologist, “there is a rising class of diverse, young worship leaders in many megachurches that suggests otherwise.”
• For that matter, there are paths forward other than deconstruction.
• Early Christians — even those who followed a monastic path — didn’t neglect the body, “but put in its proper place.”
• It’s been a bad decade for humanities faculties in general, and it’s been a particularly tough year for those professors at Cornerstone University, a small Christian school in Michigan.
• Cuts like what took place at Cornerstone “signal the downfall of the university,” wrote
. “It is becoming no more than a shadow of what it used to be. Universities without humanities and liberal arts are merely technical training grounds in disguise.”• Meanwhile,
urged the presidents and trustees of similar institutions instead to “be cheerleaders for the value of liberal arts” — if only because their students will “need the well-rounded, freeing commitments of liberal arts to be able to handle the unknown and unknowable problems they will face down the road.”• Finally, RIP Willie Mays, probably the greatest all-around player in baseball history.