According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 21% of Americans age 5 or older speak a language at home other than English. Not surprisingly, Spanish is most common (38 million), but it’s hardly the only second language in this country. Over 11 million speak another Indo-European language, almost 10 million speak an Asian or Pacific Islands … More Beyond English and Spanish: America’s Other Languages
5/13/14 – Readers who are members or friends of the Evangelical Covenant Church — or just interested in its history — should check out Friends of Covenant History, a group that seeks “to gather, connect, and equip people interested in Covenant history and heritage.” You can like them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. To learn … More Friends of Covenant History
Congratulations to The History Center: Archives of the Baptist General Conference and Bethel University — named the 2014 recipient of the Davis C. Woolley Award for Outstanding Achievement in Assessing and Preserving Baptist History. This puts our archives in very good company, as last year’s winner was the special collections and archives department of the Z. … More Congratulations to the Archives of the BGC and Bethel University!
For the first time in nearly three years, the Washington Monument will be open to visitors today. So this seems like a good time to revisit my February 2012 post on the history of that monument, and of presidential memorials in general. Commemoration has been much on my mind since my trip to the battlefields and … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Presidential Memorials
Normally, I’m pretty bad about recognizing Hallmark holidays, but today is no ordinary Mothers’ Day: it was 100 years ago this year that Pres. Woodrow Wilson first declared it a honorary holiday. (Annoying historian intrusion: Just days later, the U.S. Senate failed again to approve a constitutional amendment giving mothers and other women the right to … More Happy Mothers’ Day
Here… • While her talk at Bethel last week was about faith and science, I’ll happily credit journalist Krista Tippett with inspiring two posts about the practice of history: first, what do historians mean when they ask “Why?”; and second, how is history a “ministry of listening“? • Thanks to Paul Putz for teaching us about the … More That Was The Week That Was
Before the final bell rings on National Teacher Appreciation Week, let me rerun the part of a May 2013 post in which I talked about the one teacher who had the greatest impact on my life: Maureen Conway of Mounds Park Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota. Not surprisingly, I’m far from the only person who feels … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Ms. Conway
For a while earlier this year, whenever I signed out of my Facebook account, I would see a full-screen ad for a Christian dating service. Now, this was troubling if only because my Facebook relationship status is very clearly Married; I hate to think what Facebook thinks it’s learned about me that makes me a good target for … More Christian Matchmaking: Past and Present
I’ve got a folder on Chrome where I keep bookmarks for posts and articles that I either plan to blog about myself or at least pass along via my Saturday That Was The Week That Was posts. But every month at least one link seems to slip through the cracks and sits there, gathering virtual dust… So in … More Spring Cleaning: Some Great Links I Forgot to Share
As I mentioned yesterday, public radio journalist Krista Tippett recently appeared at Bethel University to speak about her book Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit. One of those conversations inspired yesterday’s post on what historians mean when they ask the question “Why?” of the past. Today I want to reflect on Tippett’s larger purpose, as the … More History as a “Ministry of Listening”
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