6/1/12 – My colleague Chris Armstrong is happy to report that the newest issue of Christian History magazine is available! It sounds fascinating and ambitious, seeking to explain why the claim that America is a “Christian nation” is hugely complicated by the sheer diversity of American Christianities and the competing visions for social change that … More New from Christian History Magazine
As grading continues to preoccupy my time, let the reruns roll on with a post that found me drawing on Frederick Buechner to help students think about the concept of calling. Last night my family hosted the students in Bethel’s capstone course for History majors. They turned in their research papers, shared a meal, tolerated … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Gladness, Need, and Calling
From this past April… For those reading my series recapping Bethel’s Pietism colloquium, let me encourage you to look at something Jay Phelan wrote yesterday on his blog, Additional Markings. His post begins: I had reason again this week to be thankful that I am a Pietist. For reasons buried deeply within Vatican paranoia the … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Pietism vs. the “Imperial Church”
While I struggle to get spring grades in, I’ll buy back some time by reposting some favorites. Today: my three-part series on my favorite baseball books. Check out the “tag cloud” on the home page of this blog, and you’ll find — amid all the terms related to Christianity, history, and education — one sport. … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Play Ball!
Grades are due this Friday, so I’ll be posting some “best of” pieces while I take time away from active blogging. Given that today is Memorial Day in the United States, I thought I’d start by combining my four-part series on World War I memorials into one long post (broken up into pages). In a … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Commemorating World War I
“If it’s so easy, let’s see you do it” will be an eminently fair response to this post, offering as it does a suggestion for how to give speeches or preach sermons at college commencement or baccalaureate exercises from someone who’s done neither. Here goes… It’s been a commencement-filled weekend for me: my own university’s … More Sent Out to Serve, and Suffer
Here • Celebrating my colleague, mentor, and friend G.W. Carlson — retiring from full-time teaching after nearly 45 years on the faculty of Bethel College (now University). • GW would have been much more articulate (and fiery) than me in explaining why history is a perfectly good field of study for anyone passionate about social … More That Was The Week That Was
I doubt he’d remember, but I first met G.W. Carlson in March 2002. Neither of us could have guessed that ten years later I’d be helping to make this movie about him: Back to March 2002… I had just turned in my dissertation and was in town for my brother’s wedding. We grew up in … More Commencement: A Tribute to G.W. Carlson
Last week I was pleasantly surprised to receive the following query from one of our admissions counselors at Bethel: she had been talking to a prospective student who wondered which major would be most beneficial in preparing someone to fight sex slavery, estimated to be the second largest criminal enterprise in the world today (after … More History and Social Justice
5/24/12 – After a two-month break while my co-host Chris Moore and his wife Stacy welcomed their first child, a new episode of The Policast is now available on iTunes U. The Policast is a political affairs podcast that we’ve produced occasionally this spring and to which we’ll return in a more regular fashion as the presidential and … More On This Episode of The Policast…
The Pietist Schoolman 