Recent months have seen increased coverage of Muslim radicals in the Middle East, presidential statements about what is and what is not “real” Islam, and new articles on where groups like ISIS fit in the Muslim faith, if at all. I have also just finished teaching a class called “Islam, Politics, and the Middle East.” So this … More Why We Need to Stop Trying to Identify “True” Islam
In the past week or so, I’ve seen a fair amount of new traffic for a two-year old series I ran on the history of colleges and universities closing. Perhaps interest was stimulated by the news that the board of directors of Sweet Briar College voted to close the school at the end of this academic year, … More When Colleges Close: Sweet Briar
I don’t normally use The Pietist Schoolman for Bethel business, but this morning I’m going to pass along an announcement via our department blog: We’re happy to announce that we’ve begun a job search for the newest member of our faculty: a gifted, innovative teacher committed to the mission of Bethel and able to straddle the fields of ancient/medieval and digital … More Ancient-Digital: Announcing Our Department’s New Search
One of the ablest defenders of the liberal arts, in a time when many question their value, is Wesleyan University president Michael Roth. Indeed, before becoming an administrator, Roth was trained as an intellectual historian, and he still finds time to teach in that field. Last month he wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal probing his students’ hesitation whenever he … More Am I “Making Religious Believers” Out of My Students? (part 1)
3/4/15 – Episode five of Past & Presence is one of my favorites because it gave us an excuse to go back to Bethel’s old campus across from the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, now home to the Hubert Humphrey Job Corps Center. (Note to self: next time you decide to visit property of the federal government, check in with security before setting … More Past and Presence: A Usable Past
I’m happy to announce that five weeks from today I’ll be in Winona Lake, Indiana to speak to the faculty of Grace College about our book on Pietism and Christian higher education. Readers of this blog may know Grace best as the academic home of our regular guest-blogger Jared Burkholder, who played a key role … More Taking Our Book on the Road: Grace College
Here… • Welcome back to blogging, Jared Burkholder! • If you read Jared’s return post, you’ll notice a plug for a Pietist Vision event coming up… I gave less subtle plugs on behalf of myself for an April visit to Messiah College and my appearance on the podcast Christian Humanist Profiles • Our newest Past & Presence webisode inspired a … More That Was The Week That Was
This past fall I stepped away from The Pietist Schoolman as part of an effort to focus on research and writing that also took me on a sabbatical from Grace College to the Young Center for Pietist and Anabaptist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. (Here’s our interview with Jared about that sabbatical.) I took my … More Thanks for holding my place, Chris!
One of my favorite aspects of producing our department’s weekly webisodes is that it has afforded our faculty the chance to film conversations about our discipline. All have been interesting, but the one we posted yesterday stood out: my conversation with Americanists Diana Magnuson and AnneMarie Kooistra about historical evidence and research. As usual for these conversations, … More Paper Clips as Relics, or Historical Research as an Encounter with the Sacred
2/25/15 – I think that the fourth episode of Past & Presence, our department’s new webisode series, is our best yet. Not only do we interview an alum who parlayed his History degree into a corporate VP position, visit the oldest Swedish Baptist church in Minnesota, preview our Modern Middle East course, and hear from a student who spent the fall … More Past and Presence: Primary Sources
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