With the 2016 Summer Olympics just days away, let’s test your knowledge of the religious history of the games: Who banned the ancient Olympics in AD 393, and for what religious reason? What 1935 initiative had the joint support of Reinhold Niebuhr, the first Catholic to be a major party nominee for president, and the … More Religion in The Olympics… And The Olympics as Religion
Presenting the top ten posts of July at The Pietist Schoolman: An Inadequate Response to Two More Shootings “Tell It Like It Is”: How the Church Should Respond to Trump For My Wife, on Our Tenth Wedding Anniversary Which Country (and Continent) Dominates Each Olympic Sport? Why I Signed the Historians Against Trump Letter Dallas (One More Inadequate … More The Big Ten
Here… • I couldn’t completely buy that my employer is suddenly one of the top 100 universities in the country — but I couldn’t disregard that ranking either. • A new digital project helped me revisit an old question: just when did Micah 6:8 become so popular among American Christians? • I finished my Anxious Bench series on historical … More That Was The Week That Was
Last week my Anxious Bench colleague John Turner drew our attention to America’s Public Bible, a new project by Lincoln Mullen. A leading digital historian who works (like John) at George Mason University, Lincoln describes APB in this way: America’s Public Bible uncovers the presence of biblical quotations in the nearly 11 million newspaper pages in the Library of Congress’s … More Following Up: Micah 6:8 in American Rhetoric
When I turned in my spring grades in May, I worked at the country’s 451st best university. But when I return from sabbatical next year, I’ll be teaching courses at the country’s 82nd best university. No, I’m not changing jobs. But Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota jumped all the way into the top 100 in the most recent … More So I Guess I Work for One of the Top 100 Universities in the Country
Time to show my hand and reveal of my favorite examples of historical moviemaking. Well, TV series-making, but then that’s just another form of the motion picture. After spending two Anxious Bench posts developing a set of four criteria for evaluating that kind of storytelling, today I applied them to two cable TV shows: the feminist time-traveling drama Outlander (Starz!) … More Soviets and Sassenachs: My Two Favorite Historical TV Series
Here… • My wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. The traditional gift is tin or aluminum, but I went with public praise and ecclesiological rumination instead. • We’ll be spending my sabbatical as a family in Virginia, where I can’t wait to attend the biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. • Some reflections on the Stanford … More That Was The Week That Was
I’ve occasionally used this blog to write about my mom and her family, my dad and his family, and my children. But today I’m going to break with longstanding tradition and devote an entire post to my wife Katie. (But knowing how much this will embarrass her, I’ll try to keep it short. Just over a … More For My Wife, on Our Tenth Wedding Anniversary
Today’s guest post comes from one of my former students at Bethel University, Peter Williams, who brings a unique perspective to one of the most controversial legal cases of the year. Now a Judge Advocate/attorney in the Minnesota National Guard, Peter currently serves as a Regional Special Victims’ Counsel for the National Guard Bureau in … More Justice Rising? A Pragmatic Look at the Stanford Rape Case (Peter Williams)
Today at The Anxious Bench you’ll find part two of my series on how we might evaluate historical movies like Free State of Jones, which has inspired rave reviews from some historians and criticism from others. If you missed the first part, go back to read what I meant that historical movies and TV series must strive to be both … More What Makes for the Best Historical Movies? (part 2)
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