That Was The Week That Was
October 19-25, 2025
This week I celebrated my 50th birthday and the 100th issue of another Pietist publication. Elsewhere:
• Black Protestants join evangelicals as the American Christians most likely to support public school teachers not only leading prayers, but referring to Jesus in the process.
• One Black Christian explained why he no longer says “I’m Christian before I’m Black.”
• What can contemporary Christians learn from their medieval brethren about the virtuous life?
• There are still a few spots open on our German Reformation tour next June… which I wish I could extend to Italy, where a visit to Florence might help us understand the 15th century context for 16th century religious change.
• Meet “the most accomplished forgotten man of the 20th century”: Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice and war crimes prosecutor.
• Is “the best podcast of all time” a deep dive into the past by an amateur historian?
• The latest hint of global warming is especially annoying: Iceland now has mosquitoes.
• Indictments against an NBA player and coach raised new concerns about the relationship between gambling and sports. One thing that might help: get rid of “prop bets,” so easy for a single person to rig.
• The President of the United States posting a video of himself dumping human sewage on protestors “might seem like an ephemeral bit of trollish fun, but it is an example of an alarming pattern. Trump is provoking an epistemic collapse—cultivating the sense that every shard of once-dependable evidence is suspect. He is ushering in an era of distrust and confusion, in which the president molds perception to serve his own interests.”
• I don’t have any great affection for the White House in general or its East Wing in particular. But tearing down the latter for the sake of putting the current resident’s stamp on the former is just the latest example of how he is “mobilizing heritage and architecture as tools of ideology and control.”
• 56% of Americans — including two-thirds of independents — agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”
• Peggy Noonan is the latest conservative to sound the alarm about the current president and his advisers: “Their triumphalism is accelerating my now-chronic unease over the sense that the strict lines of our delicately balanced republic are being washed away.”
• If conservatism is gaining ground on college campuses, one former progressive argued that it’s because conservatives are more committed to debating ideas.
• If college faculty are burning out, perhaps it reflects how “self-censorship becomes part of daily decision-making.”
• A new revenue stream for some universities: on-campus retirement communities where seniors both live and take classes.
• I’ve been glad to see our kids reading Lord of the Flies this month in their English class, since so much of teaching reading in high school involves excerpts, rather than entire books.