Feels like the blog’s been a little too focused on history of late, so I’m dwelling a bit more on current events and popular culture this week. And, at the risk of my least favorite of the four major professional team sports showing up in this blog’s tag cloud, that attitude seems to beg a … More Tebow
At the turn of the 20th century, the catchphrase of many German nationalists was that their nation deserved its “place in the sun,” its turn in world history to take on a leading role. For example, defending his government’s attempts to expand Germany’s presence in East Asia in 1897, chancellor Bernhard von Bülow vowed that … More Germany’s Place in the Sun
Some quick thoughts about what’s happened at Penn State in recent days, including the student rioting last night… First, I feel for people like sportswriter Michael Weinreb, who experienced an idyllic upbringing in State College — his father was on the Penn State faculty — and had a good experience at PSU himself. Despite that … More Unhappy Valley
9/27/11 – Two interesting pieces today on higher education. The Guardian reports on a debate between British academics and the authors of a government white paper about the purposes of higher education: is it about private benefits for the individual students and the corporations that will employ them, or the public benefits for society? (H/T … More What is Higher Education?
That collective exhaling you heard this morning came from the chancellors, presidents, provosts, and other leaders of the 1378 colleges and universities that participate in the U.S. News Best Colleges ranking process, results of which were released today. As someone who indirectly participates in this process (by teaching at one of those institutions and so … More On College Rankings
Yesterday I posted a response to the debate over Dominion theology, which holds that Scripture mandates that Christians control secular institutions, including political ones. There have been several sources for the revival of a debate whose roots go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, but probably the most important was Ryan Lizza’s profile … More Evangelicals and “Dominion” (part 2)
One of the most unlikely hot topics of the past month has been a kind of political theology that, to the extent it achieved any real popularity, peaked in the early 1980s: Dominion theology, or as New Yorker correspondent Ryan Lizza calls it in his now famous profile of Michelle Bachmann, Dominionism. It contends that … More Evangelicals and “Dominion” (part 1)
8/18/11 – Mark Pape, a Christian blogger in England, has a thoughtful piece on the recent rioting in the UK published in Relevant magazine. I’m jaded enough by studying the history of protest in Europe to suspect that there were more “greedy opportunistic people” involved than the “some” he admits, but as a reflection on … More A Christian Response to the London Riots
As I suggested in my weekly recap last Saturday, I’ve had a hard time convincing myself to write a second post about the man who committed the massacre in Norway last month: Anders Behring Breivik. Intending to analyze his targeting of “cultural Marxists” in addition to Muslims, I attempted to read through parts of Breivik’s … More Norway: “A Christian Fundamentalist”
I’m very reluctant to comment on last Friday’s tragic events in Norway. (1) The story is still evolving. (2) I’m not an expert on Norway, or on right-wing extremism in Europe. And (3) as a historian, I’d always prefer to analyze events from a temporal distance. But… I do teach modern European history regularly, and … More Norway: “A Very Old War”
The Pietist Schoolman 