Category Archives: Fundamentalism

Liberty, Ethology, Pathology?

The New York Times Magazine recently ran an article about Liberty University’s debate team (HT: Dappled Things). It has an impressively large budget of $500,000, and its five full-time judges are aggressive about recruiting and training, making Liberty the highest-ranked school overall in several national debate associations. The article alludes to a difference between Liberty’s […]

Christine Rosen’s Fundamentalist Education

After hearing an interesting NPR interview with Christine Rosen, author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, I thought her book would describe why she left “fundamentalism.” Other books do that: Leaving the Fold is a collection of testimonies of former “fundamentalists” who end up everywhere from milquetoast Christianity to bizarre spiritualistic […]

Voice on Fundamentalist Ecumenism

Writing for the Voice, the alumni magazine of Bob Jones University, Mark Sidwell recounts an exchange between a potential hire for the theology faculty and Bob Jones, Sr., the eponymous founder of the fundamentalist school: When Dr. Jones Sr. wrote to Brokenshire, asking him whether as a Presbyterian he would be able to teach students […]

BJU Joins Murtha and Sheehan?

Blawger Eric Muller thinks that this is evidence that “support for the war is slipping a tad bit” : the editor of Bob Jones University’s student newspaper, the Collegian, is calling for a troop pullout from Iraq. The United States should start to gradually remove its troops from Iraq. We’ve been there long enough and […]

I’m Being Retentive About Retention

The spokesman at my alma mater gives a figure that doesn’t match my experience: Pait acknowledges that students sometimes feel as though the school’s policies “cramp their style.” However, the university maintains an extremely strong retention rate; sometimes as high as 95 percent. I think my freshman class had about 1500-2000 members, and I remember […]

Choraling Rutter

Kudos to Dan Forrest. I didn’t really know him that well, but we were in at least one music theory class together in college. Apparently he needed the class less than I, because he just beat out John Rutter for first prize in the John Ness Beck award for outstanding selected sacred choral anthem. No […]