As we Americans get ready to celebrate our nation’s heritage by blowing up some small portion of it, here are a few stories you might have missed:
A new plea for an old idea: Nobel laureate explains how to improve science education in colleges.
SCOTUS decides in favor of religious schools. Government can be forced to include churches in grant-funding schemes. Blaine Amendments are out.
What could a religious conservative dislike about “worldview” education? Rod Dreher thinks it misses the point of true education.
How can we encourage career-changers without allowed untrained teachers? Curmudgucrat Peter Greene makes his case for high-quality alternative teacher certification.
Historian Daniel K. Williams explains the “Democrats’ religion problem” in the NYT.
Amy Harmon follows up on her story about teaching climate change. What are real teachers doing?
Historian John Fea blasts the “Christian Nation” rhetoric of Trump’s “Court evangelicals.”
Do “evangelicals” oppose same-sex marriage? Or only old evangelicals? In WaPo, Sarah Pulliam Bailey looks at new survey results.
What does it mean to learn something? Daniel Willingham wrestles with a definition.
Who is protesting on campuses? It’s not “liberals,” Jacques Berlinblau argues.
Peter Berger, RIP. D. Michael Lindsay eulogizes Berger’s influence among evangelical academics.
I Love You but You're Going to Hell 
Dan
/ July 2, 2017Lindsay uses the occasion of Berger’s death to grind an old axe about his dissertation. Nice! Take note (and ask why) Lindsay is so intent on painting Berger as a mainstream “liberal,” an Evangelical Lutheran who was not an evangelical-evangelical but still “good.”
Berger was no liberal in the social and political domain; that’s clear enough in his books, his close friendship and projects with Richard John Neuhaus, and his articles for The American Interest in recent years.
Much like Neuhaus, Berger had a positive view of and formative influence from modern theology, historicism, and “higher criticism,” which disallowed anything like the naive rationalist “faith” of evangelical-fundamentalist literalism. In this Berger (and Neuhaus) also had a premodern view of language, meaning, and signification as analogical, not direct, and certainly not scientific. This is the stuff that Evangelicalism slips up on and attacks as “liberal” because it requires an agnostic form of faith and even the idea that God/gods and religion are necessary fictions (“social constructs”) for a moral and stable political order. If you take this position as a liberal and even an atheist you are conservative and pious enough for the religious right.
Dan
/ July 2, 2017Lindsay’s praise for Os Guinness is also rather craven and indicative of Lindsay’s priorities. The man has zero relevance as a scholar alongside Berger and others Lindsay names — try reading his paranoid, dystopian, homophobic, apocalyptic, and “prophetic” polemical rantings since the 1970s for an eyeful of the fear InterVarsity Press and others have pumped out to popular Evangelical audiences who think of Guinness as a “scholar.”