10/4/12 – I’m about to get on a plane for Boston, where I’ll be attending the Conference on Faith and History’s biennial meeting, at Gordon College. (Read a preview of my paper here.) I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll be able to do until my weekend links post appears Saturday night or Sunday afternoon, … More Off to Boston!
If years were measured by the stature of the historians who die during them, 2012 would have to rank right up there. I wrote earlier this year in tribute to the military historian John Keegan. Then last week we lost Eugene Genovese, one of the leading scholars of the American South, and American intellectual historian … More Eric Hobsbawm: A Historian and His Hope
This year I’ve written several posts on how the First World War has been commemorated: first a set of four on memorials, monuments, and cemeteries in Western Europe; then a recent series of five on commemoration here in Minnesota. If you missed some or all of the series, you can find the entries indexed here, … More Commemorating WWI in Europe and Minnesota: An Overview
This weekend I’ll be joining the other members of the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) for its biennial conference, held this year at Gordon College outside Boston. CFH is my favorite professional society, and I’m honored to be part of a Saturday morning panel on Pietism and Christian colleges and universities in the 20th … More A Preview of My CFH Talk on Pietism at Bethel
Last Monday I encouraged readers to reject the temptation to expose themselves only to those sources that reconfirm their own opinions, as if they have nothing to learn from those with whom they disagree. Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute called the phenomenon a type of “epistemic closure” in a series of 2010 posts … More Rejecting Epistemic Closure: Progressives for Conservatives to Read
Here • This is a blog that seeks to explore “Christianity, history, education, and how they intersect.” So naturally the most popular post of the week had to do with thinking through how Americans in a not-too-distant might replace pro football. (Thanks again to my friends and colleagues Sam Mulberry and Chris Moore for doing … More That Was The Week That Was
By almost any measure, the National Football League is the most popular and profitable professional sports league in the United States, and likely in the world. Popular? In 2011 all but two of the top 25 most watched telecasts in this country were NFL games, and a Harris poll earlier this year found that 36% … More Replacing the NFL: A Thought Experiment (with Chris Moore and Sam Mulberry)
At some point in my life, it was bound to happen: I would be asked to teach Sunday School. And not the adult kind, which I’ve done several times and isn’t all that different from teaching college students — except that the audience is much more likely to have been awake more than ten minutes … More 4 Things I’ve Learned Teaching 4th Grade Sunday School
Yesterday I lauded a variety of conservative writers whom I encouraged my left-leaning friends to include in their regular reading rotation. One reason I recommended many of them is that they possess the rare ability to engage in critical reflection on their own movement. To wit, David Brooks’ New York Times column this morning and … More Two of My “Conservatives for Progressives” Reflect on the State of Conservatism
In the shadow of the Mall of America and Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport stand two very different kinds of memorials to Minnesotans’ participation in the two world wars and other conflicts: one the product of design, the other the victim of neglect. First, Fort Snelling National Cemetery, the final resting place of over 180,000 men … More Commemorating WWI in Minnesota: Fort Snelling
The Pietist Schoolman 