Among my favorite posts from this past February was this second entry in my — not yet complete — series on “The Vocation of a Christian Historian,” asking whether historians ought to think of what they do as a profession, vocation, or both. As I mentioned last week, as part of Bethel’s faculty promotion process … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Profession vs. Calling
With two exams to grade at work, it seems like a good moment to rerun some favorite posts from the first three months of 2013. We’ll start by stretching the “Best of The Pietist Schoolman” definition a bit and collate four posts I wrote for our department blog, at different points along the way in … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Teaching WWI in Europe
I’ll be honest: the primary point of this post is to cover one English major at Bethel with so much praise that she’ll feel compelled to take at least one History course from me before she graduates. But in the process, readers not named Abby Stocker might also find themselves reappraising their assumptions about what … More Students as Scholars
That’s the topic of this morning’s Room for Debate forum at the New York Times website. It asks six contributors, “…in today’s economy, what should ambitious young people pursue? Which majors and careers have a reliable “return on investment?” Click here for the full forum. Just to pull out a few responses… Katie Bardaro, an … More College and Jobs: Are There Safe Bets?
Back in January, Pres. Obama used part of his State of the Union address to generate enormous traffic for a page at the Department of Education (DOE) website: a “College Scorecard” that provided easy-to-understand data on the net cost, graduation rate, debt burden, and loan default rate for institutions of higher learning in this country, … More The Affordability of Evangelical Colleges and Universities
Perhaps no book has done more to make me think anew about my vocation as a Christian historian than Confessing History (Univ. of Notre Dame Press). So as I sought points of entry for discussing that topic in my promotion essay, I took some inspiration from a piece in the January/February 2012 issue of Books … More The Vocation of a Christian Historian: Seeking and Telling Truth
3/5/13 – I’ll be giving a talk on “Blogging, Scholarship, and Teaching” this Thursday morning, 10:15-11:00, in the Bethel University Library. If you can’t make it, I’ll be sure to pass along a link to any video that gets uploaded.
Our textbook orders for next fall are due this Friday, and I’m absolutely not prepared. But I can take some solace in the fact that I already know exactly what text I’ll be using in Spring 2014 for our department’s capstone Senior Seminar: Why Study History? Reflecting on the Importance of the Past, by friend-of-this-blog … More Why Study History?
As part of a larger controversy boiling over at Cedarville University, its board of trustees last month voted to cut the school’s philosophy major, approving a recommendation made by the Academic Council earlier in January. Reporters and commentators tended to associate the elimination of philosophy (along with the resignation of the school’s president and vice … More Philosophy at Evangelical Colleges
How do historians define what it is that they do? Is it a profession? A vocation? Both? As I mentioned last week, as part of Bethel’s faculty promotion process I recently wrote a lengthy essay on the meaning of vocation for a Christian historian like myself. In my first post stemming from that essay, I … More The Vocation of a Christian Historian: Profession vs. Calling
The Pietist Schoolman 