I concluded the second part of this preview of the conclusion to our forthcoming book on Pietism and Christian higher education (IVP, late 2014) with the sentence that provides the essay its title: “…Pietist educators ought to bear one principle in mind: Their mission does not depend on innovations; their mission is innovation.” Explaining what … More The Pietist University in the 21st Century (part 3)
This morning I’ll continue my preview of the conclusion to our forthcoming book, The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education: Forming Whole and Holy Persons, with a section considering how Pietists might respond to one popular “disruptive innovation” within higher ed. It resolves to the claim that gives the conclusion its title… Decision makers will need … More The Pietist University in the 21st Century (part 2)
I’m currently editing the manuscript for our new book, The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education: Forming Whole and Holy Persons, due out from InterVarsity Press at the end of the year. Most of the chapters are written by current and former colleagues from Bethel University, but I’m happy to chip in with an introduction and … More The Pietist University in the 21st Century (part 1)
This afternoon I’ll be meeting with prospective students and their parents. I hope that they’ve all read this report from the Pew Research Center: On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment—from personal earnings to job satisfaction to the share employed full time—young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education. And when … More What’s More Expensive Than Going to College? Not Going to College
I’ve sometimes dreamed of having a holodeck-like classroom in which the walls were massive screens that could be changed to make it seem like we were suddenly sitting in the middle of the same physical environment we were discussing. To teach the French Revolution while sitting in the middle of Paris’ Place de la Concorde, … More What Did History Smell Like?
When I write about books on this blog, they’re usually academic or semi-academic works of history or theology. But for the end of the week, I thought I’d share a rather different kind of book that my wife and I are reading — both as parents and as teachers of a 4th grade Sunday School … More Spiritual Disciplines for Children
After nearly three years of blogging, you’d think that I’d have exhausted my ability to reveal semi-embarrassing details of my life. But I’m not sure I’ve yet mentioned that, in the summers after 3rd and 4th grades, I spent a week at French camp. It was called Lac du Bois. I lived in a cabin … More The French Are Coming! Language Immersion as Soft Power
One more attempt to explain the inexplicable value of the liberal arts, and especially of the humanities, through metaphor. This one came to me last Tuesday and Wednesday, as I taught my World War II students about the end of the war in Europe. Like all such metaphors, it’s meant for musing. I almost hope … More The Purpose of the Liberal Arts is Purpose
The enormous, blogging-unfriendly workload notwithstanding, there’s at least one clear benefit of teaching a course in Bethel’s three-week intensive known as “J-term”: when you spend nearly three hours per afternoon with students, class really does start to feel like a community. I’m not great at community-building, but I do appreciate the insights of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s … More Bethel or Luz? The Christian College as the “House of God”
I think it was sometime in the fall of 2003, my first semester teaching at Bethel University, when I blurted out to members of my Modern Europe class something like, “You wouldn’t be interested in a course on the history of World War II, would you?” More than ten years and lots of student requests … More Previewing My New WWII Course
The Pietist Schoolman 