Once I deliver my paper on Pietism at Bethel University tomorrow morning, my attention will shift to a different kind of writing project: an essay on the integration of learning and Christian faith in support of an application for promotion in faculty rank. I long ago decided that I was going to write my promotion … More Thoughts from CFH 2012: Tracy McKenzie’s Presidential Address
I missed Carlos Eire’s address last night, so today was my first taste of the 2012 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. I missed the 2010 version, but my sense is that this gathering is larger than the one in 2008 at Bluffton University. Some highlights from some of the papers I heard … More Thoughts from CFH 2012: Friday
At some point in my life, it was bound to happen: I would be asked to teach Sunday School. And not the adult kind, which I’ve done several times and isn’t all that different from teaching college students — except that the audience is much more likely to have been awake more than ten minutes … More 4 Things I’ve Learned Teaching 4th Grade Sunday School
Spending too much time thinking or worrying about college rankings seems like a clear path to insanity, so I’ll make this my last of three posts (plus one re-post) on the subject for this season… In previous posts I’ve joined, well, almost everyone who looks at these things and criticized U.S. News for basing as … More Ranking Christian Colleges (part 2)
Few books have been as significant in my professional life as Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation, edited (and about half-written) by the husband and wife team of Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, of Messiah College. I first encountered it in 2006, during a summer workshop at Bethel University led by the Jacobsens. … More Religion’s “Return” to Higher Education
This semester I’m directing an independent study on the theory and practice of public history by a student who’s interested in pursuing graduate study in that increasingly popular field. In our weekly conversation on Wednesday, we talked about his initial impressions of how public historians have tried to define what it is that they do. … More Crowdsourcing and the Practice of History
Yesterday U.S. News released its annual college rankings, and I summarized an alternative model utilized by the magazine Washington Monthly. While U.S. News continues to rely on factors like reputation, entrance exam scores, and alumni giving (and, as its growing chorus of critics complains, on data supplied by the colleges themselves — data already manipulated … More Ranking Christian Colleges (part 1)
Today is the day that the annual U.S. News rankings of America’s best colleges are published. (Here’s the summary — note that the rankings I’ll discuss below are from last year’s report.) I already reposted my September 2011 take on the U.S. News survey, assuming that my response probably wouldn’t change much from 2011 to 2012 … More Research, Service, and Social Mobility: “A Different Kind of College Ranking”
The largest memorial to those Minnesotans who died in World War I no longer exists, except for a preserved fragment and an impressive website that thoroughly documents its nearly ninety-year history. Opened in 1924, the University of Minnesota’s Memorial Stadium hosted six national championship-winning football teams before the Gophers moved off-campus to the Metrodome in … More Commemorating WWI in Minnesota: The Brickhouse
U.S. News’ “Best Colleges” rankings aren’t scheduled to be released until a week from today, but since I’m 99% sure that my opinion of them won’t have changed drastically since this time last year, let me preemptively address them with this “best of” post from last September. (I’ve actually got another post in development that … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: On College Rankings
The Pietist Schoolman 