For Thanksgiving I’ll simply repost a brief piece I wrote for our department blog earlier this week. Probably most useful for those of you who like to put off your shopping (and menu planning) until the day of the event, though there’s also some fun trivia in there even if you’ve got everything set to … More Have a Historic Thanksgiving!
As a teacher, I grow restless easily, tinkering for the sake of tinkering. But even in those classes that I teach yearly or semesterly, there are certain fine-tuned exercises that I expect to repeat for years to come. One of those happened last week in my upper-division survey of modern European history, when after one … More Ordinary Men: Empathy and Judgment in the History of the Holocaust
The ten most popular posts in the last month here at The Pietist Schoolman: Tolkien, Lewis, and the Memory of War Paul Wellstone: The Conscience of a Liberal (G.W. Carlson) Veep-Stakes “The Capital of the Movement” Covenant Kids Congo For the Last Time, It’s Not a Good Idea to Make Nazi Analogies What If? Rejecting … More The Big Ten
Seven score and nine years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln ascended the dais at the dedication of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the sleepy town that had hosted the bloodiest battle in American history just over four months before. Word for word, I can’t imagine a discourse more powerful than the two-minute speech Lincoln … More This Day in History: The Gettysburg Address
Here • I’m not sure Pope Leo XIII thought all that much of evangelical Protestants in his day, but some of them in the present won’t let that get in the way of their admiring his most famous encyclical. (Meanwhile, Alan Jacobs was a bit less sanguine about finding “the common good.”) • Why Augustine … More That Was The Week That Was
11/16/12 – I’m afraid I’ll be Europe-bound while this is happening, but readers interested in Pietism who happen to live in New Orleans or will be attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in January might want to stop by the sensational-sounding session entitled “When Religious Leaders Die.” Organized by the Pietism … More Pietism Studies at AHA
Today in my Modern Europe class we’re wrapping up a week on the Holocaust by watching a German movie about Sophie Scholl and the other Munich University students who formed the anti-Nazi White Rose movement. It’s as hopeful (and it’s definitely bittersweet) a note on which I dare end so dark a chapter of history. … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Teaching the Holocaust
I’m not sure if it’s my little-celebrated German ancestry, my occasional studies of that nation’s history, or that I’ll be spending five days there in January with my World War I students, but Adam Fletcher’s two-part post, “How to be a German in 20 easy steps,” made me laugh as much as anything I’ve seen … More How to Be German
“Is this the end” of the losing party, asked a journalist in the aftermath of a decisive election day, “and perhaps even the end of the two-party system in the United States? “Be of good cheer, ye of little faith,” he advised the losing side. “Things don’t work that way in this remarkable country, with … More “The end of the two-party system in the United States?”
How important is St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo? Let’s put it this way… I don’t write and perform parody rap videos for just any theologian-philosopher: Six years later, that lyric and video don’t seem quite as awesome as they did in the moment. But I stand by this couplet as containing some of my finest … More Happy Birthday, Augustine of Hippo!
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