It’s time for our annual holiday tradition: picking through some prominent lists of the best books of the past year to suggest potential gifts for the history buff in your life. This year we’ll cull suggestions from the New York Times (NYT), the Guardian (G), the Washington Post (WP), and Christianity Today (CT). Jessie Childs, God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England “…conjures … More The Best History Books of 2014?
Here… • Who are the most significant Americans of all time? (Is that even a useful question to ask? If so, how do we answer it?) • So many people to thank who helped shape our new book on Pietism and higher ed… Just over three weeks till it hits book shelves! (And it’s already got … More That Was The Week That Was
So look what the U.S. Postal Service left on my doorstep yesterday! It’s still a couple weeks till our book on Pietism and Christian higher education is more widely available, but it was hugely gratifying to see and hold actual copies of something that I’ve envisioned for several years. But getting my author’s copies also made me … More Acknowledgments from Our Pietism Book
If you’ve been wondering why our resident guest-blogger Jared Burkholder (Grace College, IN) hasn’t been blogging here in a while… Jared has spent the fall term as a Snowden Fellow with the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. First things first: what’s the Young Center? (And what’s the specific purpose of the Snowden Fellowship?) The Young … More Live, from Lancaster County… It’s Jared Burkholder!
In part one of their response to Smithsonian Magazine’s attempt to list “The 100 Most Significant American of All Time,” historians Miles Mullin, John Fea, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, and Jonathan Den Hartog evaluated the methodology of the project. Today, they pick apart the actual list itself… Which name were you most pleasantly surprised to see? (i.e., someone who might not … More Who Are the Most Significant Americans in History? (part 2)
12/8/14 – According to the countdown widget I’ve added to the blog, we’re now twenty-eight days away from the publication of The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education: Forming Whole and Holy Persons. But according to Amazon, our book is already the #1 new release in the higher education administration category! So don’t wait too long to preorder: copies … More Early Success for Our Pietism Book
I’ve parlayed my graduate training in diplomatic/international and European history into a license to teach on everything from human rights to church history and to write on… well, pretty much anything I want. (Thanks, WordPress!) But I retain enough self-awareness to know that I am no U.S. historian. So when I saw that Smithsonian Magazine had put out a … More Who Are the Most Significant Americans in History? (part 1)
Here… We heard from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christena Cleveland, Makoto Fujimura, and Allan Boesak. I’ll write more next week. …There and Everywhere • I wasn’t the only white evangelical writer suggesting that what happened to Michael Brown (and Eric Garner) should prompt us to listen more closely to people of color. Fred Sanders of Biola University called the sequence … More That Was The Week That Was
I’ve always been particularly fond of the virtue of hope. Here in the Christian academy it tends to be overshadowed by faith (that’s what we integrate with learning, after all), and while hope too abides, the “greatest” of the three is love. But it was hope that was at the center of two of the most influential books in … More A Week of Listening: Allan Boesak on Hope and Her Daughters
Today let me invite readers to listen to a different kind of voice. While the artist Makoto Fujimura was speaking the night before the grand jury decision and subsequent protests in Ferguson, his reflection on faith, beauty, truth, and — above all — hope couldn’t have been more timely in light of what was happening in Missouri. Invited to … More A Week of Listening: Makoto Fujimura on Hope, Beauty, and Justice
The Pietist Schoolman 