This week I launched a new series of Sunday devotions, argued for the importance of liberal arts majors, and paid tribute to a recently retired friend. Elsewhere:
• CNN reported on White Christian nationalism… and one of the historians they interviewed asked if the headline was right to call WCN “imposter Christianity.”
• John Fea suggested some Christian alternatives to the politics of the religious right.
• John McGreevy explained how Catholic debates over democracy in the early 20th century led to “one of the key achievements of twentieth-century political history: Christian Democratic parties.”
• Another Catholic historian considered the limits of historical analogies (chiefly, Prohibition) for the Dobbs decision on abortion.
• An evangelical seminarian reviewed the new memoir from historian Charles Marsh, whose evangelical upbringing didn’t prepare him for the mental breakdown he experienced in seminary.
• One of the most influential pastors in the evangelical wing of the Church of England stepped down as vicar of one of London’s most popular congregations.
• Daniel K. Williams assessed the political implications of the “southern Bible belt… quickly becoming a region of unchurched or lapsed Protestants who may still hang onto their evangelical identity to at least a certain extent but who don’t think going to church is necessary.”
• RIP Ron Sider, the author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and founder of Evangelicals for Social Action. (Also a Yale-trained historian… I may try to write more about that next week.)
• Why are more and more single women leaving evangelical churches?
• “The values that are often associated with evangelicalism were not produced by evangelicals out of whole cloth,” contended theologian Kirsten Sanders, “rather, they presented the best way to market a religion with any hope of surviving.”
• The world’s greatest chess player will not defend his title. Does his decision have anything to teach Christians?
• An American theologian reported on what’s it been like to try to sustain conversations with Russian Christians after the Putin regime invaded Ukraine.
• The fact that both Hitler and Stalin hated something seems like a good enough reason to learn more about its history.
• Speaking of the Soviet tyrant… Geoffrey Roberts’ newest book on the USSR is a study of Stalin’s reading habits.
• The newest ally in the fight against climate change is a foundation named for a man who “made his fortune by fueling a growing United States with carbon.”
• By age 26, 80% of Americans live 100 miles or less from where they grew up.
• Does homework cloak structural inequality in a “myth of meritocracy”?
• According to one higher ed analyst, college financial aid “has a lot more in common with airlines hawking seats or dealers selling cars than you might realize.”