Over at his Patheos blog, Christian Piatt is attempting a rather ambitious ranking of the “Top 25 Christian blogs you should be reading,” using a crowdsourcing/curating tool called Listly. It’s an interesting experiment that’s already yielded thousands of votes and over 250 nominations. Check it out if only to stumble across a blog you might … More On Ranking Christian Blogs
What do war and veterans memorials mean? What should we think or feel when we visit them? And who decides the answers to those questions? Not long after leaving Highway 61 (the famous road that follows the Mississippi River) and entering the southeastern Minnesota town of Wabasha, you’ll arrive at its small Veteran’s Memorial Park. … More Commemorating WWII: Meaning, Power, and Worship
The ten most popular posts in the last month here at The Pietist Schoolman: How Not To Speak for a Generation: Rachel Held Evans on Millennials Leaving the Church Eighteen Evangelical Colleges Earn a “D” for Finances The Underquestioned Assumption at the Heart of #AHAgate Why Are There No Holidays in August? A Few More … More The Big Ten
Yesterday Elesha Coffman proposed a fun historical exercise over at the Religion in American History blog: develop an American equivalent to Mark Noll’s list of fourteen Turning Points in church history. It’s not as easy as it might seem. For example, she argued that American church history is both too big and too small to … More What Are the “Turning Points” in American Church History?
Over the weekend the always-interesting blog Disunion (hosted by the New York Times website) posted “The Name of War,” in which Georgetown University history professors Chandra Manning and Andrew Rothman tracked the evolving answer to a seemingly obvious question: What did Americans call the war fought between the Confederacy and Union from 1861 to 1865? … More When Did the Events of 1861-1865 Become “The Civil War”?
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
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