After spending quite a bit of time in various pulpits last year, I’ve had a nice long break from writing sermons. But that’ll end soon: in addition to a Bethel Chapel talk coming up on November 8th, I’ll be preaching and teaching this Sunday, October 27th, at First Covenant Church in St. Paul, MN. They’ll … More Preaching and Teaching This Reformation Sunday
On today’s new episode of The 252, Chris Moore and I talked through some of the books and articles we’ll be assigning next spring in our History and Politics of Sports course at Bethel University. Our basic text will be Richard Davies’ Sports in American Life, but Chris also suggested adopting Victor Cha’s analysis of the politics of … More Wednesday’s Podcast: A Sports Reading List
What follows is the text of a talk I gave yesterday evening at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. Thanks to Ben Cater, who directs general education and the Humanities Honors program at Point Loma, for inviting me to share some thoughts on the value of the Christian liberal arts. He had enjoyed … More The Value of the Christian Liberal Arts
Last week Bloomberg posted an op-ed from Steven Gerrard, a philosophy professor at Williams College who was disturbed by what he saw as the decline of free speech at that elite private college (#1, again, in this year’s U.S. News rankings). Even as I could empathize with some of his concerns, I found it an odd piece to … More Are Christian Colleges “Comfort” Colleges?
Classes are up and running, so it felt like a good time to start podcasting again. This morning Chris Moore, Sam Mulberry, and I recorded the season 2 premiere for The 252, our podcast previewing themes from Chris and my new course on the history and politics of sports. Last spring we put out weekly podcasts. … More Wednesday’s Podcast: The Best Sports Years Ever
Now that I’ve met all of my fall classes at least once, I can start to think ahead to my chances to teach and speak off campus. Here’s what currently on my speaking schedule for 2019-2020: October 2, 2019 I’ll be flying out to San Diego to give a talk on the purpose of general … More My Speaking Schedule for 2019-2020
Back in the fall of 2016, while my family was on sabbatical in Virginia, an editor’s suggestion that I write a religious biography of Charles Lindbergh made him the unnamed center of a three-part series on biography that I wrote for The Anxious Bench. If I did write such a book about Lindbergh, I mused … More “An Honest Witness”: The Diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh
One reason my blogging here has been rather hit-or-miss lately is that I’ve been busy researching my “spiritual, but not religious” biography of Charles A. Lindbergh. I didn’t repeat last summer’s productive East Coast swing through Lindbergh papers at Yale University and the Library of Congress, but I have been reading a wide variety of … More Lindbergh and the Space Race
The Imperial War Museum in London is pretty much my favorite museum in the world. But I’ve been there often enough over the past few years that last month I looked for new ways to enjoy familiar exhibits on the wars of the 20th century. Soon I found myself noticing how many artifacts were connected … More Childhood and the World Wars
Last week I thought out loud through three tours I’m starting to plan for Pietist Schoolman Travel: Sports in American History (2020) Christianity and Western Culture (2021) The American Civil War (2022) Here’s another way of visualizing what I have in mind: a map showing possible sites for each tour. If you’re interested in any or … More Oh, the Places We’ll Go!
The Pietist Schoolman 