I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Okay, so now that the Packers are out of the playoffs we can see what else is going on in the world. Here are some top stories from last week:

Kicked out for a gay cake. How conservative school leaders can mess up on LGBTQ stuff, at ILYBYGTH.

gay cake

Out, vile monster!

FL teachers march, at TD.

Teachers, parents and their supporters brought downtown Tallahassee to a standstill Monday as they protested what they said has been a systematic attack on public education dating to the late 1990s — when, coincidentally, Republicans took over the Legislature and Governor’s Office.

fl teacher march

Progressive college has to change to survive, at IHE.

“They have a very different vision of what college would be and have different needs,” [President George] Bridges said. “They want to leave Evergreen with a degree they can use in a career, in a market,” and that’s explicable to employers. Students who attended in past decades grew up in a different economic climate, he said, and weren’t seeking such specific outcomes.

RIP, Roger Scruton. Eulogy at AC.

Taking Edmund Burke and Adam Smith as his exemplars in thought, Scruton’s traditionalist conservatism always revolved around his love of place and the need for real and organic community, held together by habit, custom, and experience. All good in society, then, flows from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.

Who is an evangelical? An interview with Thomas Kidd at R&P.

the media has come to discuss evangelicals in a very narrow way. The implication is that, when we use the term, we are talking specifically about white Republicans in the United States. But when you think about the evangelical movement on the world stage, this is very misleading.

Trump’s new guidelines for school prayer. What’s new? Not much, really, for schools, but a reversal of other rules, at WaPo.

Under current regulations, faith-based providers — such as health care entities, child welfare organizations, educational nonprofits — need to give beneficiaries notice of their religious character and their right to get services elsewhere. They also have to make reasonable efforts to refer beneficiaries to another provider if the person receiving services is uncomfortable. . . . The Trump administration announced rules to end the requirement, created under the previous administration.

god-is-my-heroMormon Sunday-school manual accidentally includes racist Mormon history, at SLT.

several early readers of the 2020 “Come, Follow Me” manual were troubled to see a note in one lesson that is a throwback to previous thinking.

“The dark skin was placed upon the Lamanites so that they could be distinguished from the Nephites and to keep the two peoples from mixing,” the book explains, citing a statement made some 60 years ago by then-apostle and future church President Joseph Fielding Smith.

Advertisement

Required Reading: A Summer List from Matthew Lee Anderson

If we want to understand most people, we just need to look at the car they choose to drive and the clothes they choose to wear.  But if we want to understand smart people, we should look at the books they choose to read.

For this Fourth of July holiday, Mere Orthodoxy‘s Matthew Lee Anderson has offered a terrific list of his summer reading picks.

From Unpacking My Library, Steven Pinker’s bookshelf

As Leah Price noted recently in Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books (Yale University Press, 2011), book collections say a lot about an intellectual life.

Of course, not every book lover is necessarily a brainiac (See figure 2).  But Anderson’s list demonstrates some of the intellectual richness of today’s conservative evangelical Protestantism.  His picks include some new releases that will likely be of interest mainly to evangelicals themselves, such as Fred Bahnson’s and

Figure 2: Ol’ Blue Eyes sounding it out.

Norman Wirtzba’s Making Peace with the Land or Richard J. Mouw’s Talking with Mormons.  But it also includes titles that promise to help outsiders understand the intellectual culture of Fundamentalist America, such  as Roger Scruton’s The Face of God and Amy Black’s Honoring God in Red or Blue.  And it  features new books of interest to all, such as Andrew Delbanco’s College and a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita.

We here at ILYBYGTH are going out to celebrate our nation’s birth by blowing up a small piece of it.  But after that, we’ll hunker down with Anderson’s list and do some summer reading.