I don’t see a lot of stories from north of Minnesota’s border catch fire in my social media circles, but this one showed up on my Facebook page and Bethel’s faculty listserv last Friday: Laptops have replaced pen and paper for many post-secondary students but a Canadian study suggests using computers during lectures could be … More Do Laptop Computers Inhibit Learning?
My recent tour of about twenty memorials in southern Minnesota (plus one in western Wisconsin) was meant to help immerse me in the era of World War II, which I’ll be teaching next January at Bethel University. But more often than not, what I saw were relics of the 1990s or 2000s, not the 1940s … More Commemorating WWII: Back to the Future
Here… • A tour of memorial sites got me thinking about how to teach a new course on World War II, and prompted two new series: one on the commemoration of WWII started by asking why “living memorials” were so popular among architects, artists, and others in the 1940s; then a second looked chapters in … More That Was The Week That Was
As I continue to revisit albums that are gathering dust in my music collection, we come to the “O” section of the shelf: all of four CDs wide. Oddly enough, two of them are side projects — recorded while members were on vacation from much more famous groups. Still more oddly, both are connected to … More Albums A to Z: On Golden Smog
I wish I could say that I was clever enough to have planned yesterday’s post on the beginning of the Second World War in Asia to be published on the 68th anniversary of the Japanese surrender that ended that conflict, but… Total coincidence. But I was reminded of the significance of August 15 in the … More China and Japan 68 Years after WWII
On my recent vacation spent driving from small Minnesota town to slightly smaller Minnesota town looking at war and veterans memorials, I listened to The War, Geoffrey Ward’s book based on Ken Burns’ PBS miniseries of the same title. I’d picked it simply because it was one of the few WWII histories available as a … More The Second World War Before Pearl Harbor: China, 1937
8/14/13 – This past spring the achievements of a Bethel English major named Abby Stocker inspired me to write a tribute to our students. This summer Abby has been interning at Christianity Today, and today posted an excellent essay at CT’s Her.meneutics blog reflecting on why “Our worship spaces matter.”
It is now generally conceded that mere shafts of granite and statues of bronze, be they ever so artistic, are inadequate to express the tribute we would pay to our soldiers of democracy. Writing in American Architect in 1919, Martha Candler was about a generation too early to speak for most readers of that journal. … More Commemorating WWII: Living Memorials
At least, that’s how it might feel for the next few weeks… Some explanation: Next January, for Bethel’s three-week “interim” term, I’ll be debuting a new course on the Second World War (HIS231L), designed to alternate J-terms with a long-standing class on the First World War (HIS230L) that I’ve converted into a travel course in … More WWII Takes Over The Pietist Schoolman
Earlier this summer I looked at how the members of the evangelical Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) fared in The Financially Sustainable University, a brief by Bain & Co. and Sterling Partners that has garnered significant attention (not all favorable). 32% of CCCU schools listed in that report were classified as “Financially Unsustainable” … More Eighteen Evangelical Colleges Earn a “D” for Finances
The Pietist Schoolman 