Pledging Allegiance

I don’t know quite what to feel on the 4th of July. On the one hand, I’m a sucker for Americana. We’re spending the holiday with my wife’s family, in a small farming town in Iowa. We’ll dress our kids in red, white, and blue, grab a seat on the curb of Main Street to … More Pledging Allegiance

The Anabaptist Vision

Now that our series on teaching the history of World War I in Europe (“Over There”) is well underway, I’m starting a new (though somewhat less frequently updated) series stemming from my research into Pietism and higher education, in which we consider some significant (neo)Anabaptist critiques of Pietism. Growing up in suburban evangelical churches, I … More The Anabaptist Vision

Travel and Sojourning

A series of posts taking you day-by-day through a proposed travel version of my course HIS230L World War I. Read the introduction to the series here, or the previous post here. Friday, January 4, 2013 – flying from Minneapolis-St. Paul to London On Day 2 (well, that evening and into the morning of day 3, … More Travel and Sojourning

What Pietism Is Good For

This actually came out a week before this blog started, so I didn’t include it in my links wrap-up yesterday, but check out this brief essay from Matt Jenson recommending Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom’s short book, Angels, Worms, and Bogeys: The Christian Ethic of Pietism. Agreeing with Clifton-Soderstrom that (Hallensian) Pietists were not world-denying moralizers, Jenson concludes, … More What Pietism Is Good For

My Summer Vacation

Did you know? The members of the NHL champion Boston Bruins will have three full months between their Game 7 triumph and the beginning of training camp in which to play golf, go to the beach, and do silly things with the Stanley Cup. (Of course, members of my Minnesota Wild and the league’s thirteen … More My Summer Vacation

One Step Closer…

Two years ago my colleagues Christian Collins Winn, G.W. Carlson, and I coordinated a research conference on “The Pietist Impulse in Christianity.” Since then we’ve been working to turn selected papers from that conference into a book, a project that’s one step closer to completion after we submitted the index to our editors last week. … More One Step Closer…

Write What You Know

So, what’s this blog about? Well, I’m not about to to reject advice from anyone who can write a book about sabermetric analysis compelling enough to be turned into a Brad Pitt vehicle. Alas, another geeky guy who watches The Office mostly because of Jenna Fischer already has an incredibly well-written, long-established blog on baseball, … More Write What You Know