I don’t have all that many memories of the former senator and presidential candidate — I was only five when he was voted out of the Senate in 1980, after three terms representing South Dakota — but as a historian I know enough to find interesting what’s being remembered, and what’s being forgotten, as journalists … More Remembering (and Forgetting) George McGovern
Here • Can blogging be both “public thinking” and “digital scholarship”? • One of the contributors to our Pietist Impulse book was named a “woman to watch” by Christianity Today. (That feature was put together by CT’s excellent online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey, who is moving on to a new job.) • Resources for those … More That Was The Week That Was
The ten most popular posts in the last month here at The Pietist Schoolman: Tolkien, Lewis, and the Memory of War Replacing the NFL: A Thought Experiment (with Chris Moore and Sam Mulberry) Close-Minded Christian Colleges? Thoughts from CFH 2012: Tracy McKenzie’s Presidential Address Thoughts from CFH 2012: Saturday Veep-Stakes 4 Things I’ve Learned Teaching … More The Big Ten
Congratulations to Shirley Mullen, president of Houghton College (the first woman to hold that office), for being named one of the “50 Women You Should Know” by Christianity Today in its October 2012 issue. In that article (not yet online just posted by CT), fellow historian Mark Noll writes of Shirley that, “In evangelical higher … More Congratulations, Shirley Mullen!
If a scholar blogs, is it scholarship? When I started this enterprise in the summer of 2011, it never occurred to me to think of blogging as a form of scholarship. “A good way to cultivate the discipline of writing,” to implement the commonplace advice “that the best way to learn writing is to write”? … More Blogging: “Public Thinking” as “Digital Scholarship”?
In the space of four days I’ve blogged about two events marking their 50th anniversaries this year: the Second Vatican Council (which started October 12, 1962) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Oct. 16 of the same year). In different ways, they were among the most important events of the 20th century, but I’d never thought … More Peace on Earth: Connecting the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vatican II
Fifty years ago this morning, American national security adviser McGeorge Bundy showed President John F. Kennedy photographs taken by U-2 spy planes that had flown over Cuba two days earlier. CIA analysts concluded that the photos revealed that the Soviet Union had succeeded in deploying medium-range ballistic missiles to bases within mere minutes’ flight of … More The Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 Years Later
While I work on another post for Tuesday, enjoy this post from last fall prompted by the collision of a couple of discussions in one of my signature courses at Bethel. In the last two weeks of my Modern Europe course, we’ve twice run headlong into the hardest question historians ask: Why? First, I had … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”
Here • In retrospect, I’m not sure I should have lumped in The Avett Brothers with Mumford & Sons in a post probing the challenges of making good folk-pop music. At least a couple of the tracks on their new album are downright Beatlesque… • As a Protestant, it was interesting to read such a … More That Was The Week That Was
Three posts in one day… Can you tell that it’s Fall Break at Bethel University? After a couple of earlier posts centered on Protestantism, I’ll close my blogging for the day (?) with one focused on a seminal event in the history of Roman Catholicism: today marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the … More Reactions to the 50th Anniversary of Vatican II
The Pietist Schoolman 