http://www.pietisten.org/authors/TredwayTom.htmlen-ushttp://www.pietisten.org/winter02/cahillreview.htmlhttp://www.pietisten.org/winter02/cahillreview.htmlThomas Cahill has determined to do a seven volume series on the "Hinges of History." The first book in this effort was the best selling How the Irish Saved Civilization, and the second dealt with The Gifts of the Jews. In 1999 he published his treatment of Jesus, Desire of the Everlasting Hills, and it is hard to imagine how any of the four remaining "Hinges" volumes will surpass it in grace, wit, insight, and, even, wisdom. For pietists it has, as they say, some good news and, alas, some bad, or at least sobering, news.http://www.pietisten.org/fall04/sarajevo.htmlhttp://www.pietisten.org/fall04/sarajevo.htmlSweden is mentioned but once in David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer, (Knopf, 2004), the latest and one of the most readable treatments of the First World War to have appeared in the last decade. So why should readers of the Pietisten be concerned with the book?http://www.pietisten.org/winter0405/alexander.htmlhttp://www.pietisten.org/winter0405/alexander.htmlBy There was a time in the history of our civilization, maybe two centuries ago, when any educated person knew classical history and mythology thoroughly. But the days when classical or biblical people and events were part of the general culture are gone. There is enough gore, intrigue, and even romance in either place to warrant a screen epic every year or two, especially when the other choice for literary inspiration seems to be Spiderman or the Incredible Hulk.http://www.pietisten.org/summer06/pious.htmlhttp://www.pietisten.org/summer06/pious.htmlFor many Pietisten readers of a certain vintage (birth dates pre-Eisenhower presidency) the programmatic statement about the relationship between human civilization and the Christian Gospel was H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1956). In his work Niebuhr delineated a range of possible Christian attitudes about that relationship, stretching from complete identification with human culture to total rejection of it. http://www.pietisten.org/christmas06/navigation.htmlhttp://www.pietisten.org/christmas06/navigation.htmlIt sometimes happens that decisions formed collectively are wiser than those made by a single individual, that a committee is smarter than a solitary person. That was the case with the recent move made by the mavens who guide Pietisten. They split the responsibilities held by the Poetry and Navigation Editor into two parts and assigned these parts to separate individuals.http://www.pietisten.org/spring07/navigating.htmlhttp://www.pietisten.org/spring07/navigating.htmlMany Pietisten readers could add some names of their own to the cloud of witnesses in Hebrews. The list with Enoch or Sara or Moses on it might be expanded with the names of Karl Olsson or Barbara Hawkinson or Bruce Carlson. Pastors and Sunday School teachers; parents, siblings, roommates—all could be added to the Old Testament names in Hebrews. Most of those we would add would be people we have known personally. But some might be writers, of hymns or theologies, or perhaps church leaders, lay or clergy, whose words or acts have guided our own lives. Each of us could say with the newer RSV translation that we are “surrounded” by people of faith who have sustained and developed our own lives.http://www.pietisten.org/christmas07/text_maps.htmlhttp://www.pietisten.org/christmas07/text_maps.htmlMost maps are mini-pictures of the landscape they represent, but written texts can also be “cartographic.” Pietists have, of course, been guided by one such text-map above all others. We are told that in confused or uncertain moments some of our forebears would simply open the Scriptures at random, point to a verse on the page, and seek to divine from it what the Spirit was seeking to tell them. One presumes that they were trying to avoid inflicting their own ideas on Holy Writ. They wanted the Bible to guide them, not the other way around. But one wonders what they did when a verse seemed, at least at first, to have little or nothing to say to the matter in question. What, for example, could Isaiah 44:24-25, I am the Lord, who made all things, who also stretched out the heavens, who by myself spread out the earth, who frustrates the omens of liars, and makes fools of diviners, mean to a Swede trying to decide whether to book passage on a steamer bound from Göteborg to New York in 1878? (I leave it to you, reader, to speculate on that.)