The Pietist Schoolman

Whenever I felt like I was getting overly excited about new media, I could always say, “At least I’m not blogging.” That crumbled a month ago, but after ignoring my family for an hour to work on some post about Caravaggio or English music halls, I could always plead, “At least I’m not on Twitter.” Oh well. At least I’m not doing Google+…

I’m only following about seventy people/organizations on Twitter and still feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of tweets filling up the timeline. So I can understand how anyone might have missed the following, either here or at other blogs/sites…

Here

• Our trip around the world of World War I is nearing its end. We spent most of the week in and around Paris—contemplating Woodrow Wilson‘s experience at Versailles, using the Centre Pompidou as a springboard for some WWI counterfactuals, walking in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway and Armenian refugees, and worshiping in a variety of Parisian churches—then hopped a train to Germany, listening in on a debate between two German veterans/writers in the process.
• Speaking of counterfactuals… More beach reads, all in the realm of “alternate history.”
• Historical revisionism led Mennonite scholars like Theron Schlabach and John Roth to reconsider the relationship between Anabaptism and Pietism. (The Dale Brown piece I promised in this space last Sunday will show up next week.)
• I celebrated one month of mildly successful blogging by counting down the ten most popular posts from June 20-July 19, 2011.

Elsewhere

• I’ve already broken my self-imposed rule not to use this blog to talk about TV shows, so now I’m really intent on steering clear of baseball… But I’ll slip in this post from Craig Calcaterra: just ignore the stuff about the Cubs’ GM, and rejoice with me that a baseball blogger would use an enjoyably obscure historical word like defenestration! And people question the value of a liberal arts education…

  

• The AHA Today blog posted links to the entire series (so far) of “The Art of History” columns in the AHA newsletter, Perspectives. My favorite (much as I disagree with one of the author’s central arguments) is Gordon Wood’s defense of analytical history.
• For nine hours last Saturday, Austrian television covered the funeral of the last son of the last Habsburg emperor, born just before the war that caused that empire to collapse. Armin Thurnher argued in Foreign Policy that while the Habsburg Empire is gone, its paradoxical legacy (tolerant, but hierarchical; pluralistic, yet authoritarian) lives on in Austrian political culture.
• Lots of tributes to my favorite TV drama of the last decade.
• Campus Crusade for Christ changed its name to “Cru.” And if it’s good enough for one bulwark of evangelical culture, maybe it’s good enough for the one you’re reading. Goodbye, “Pietist Schoolman”; hello, “Pie”?
  Mmm… pie…