Last Friday North Korea announced that it would soon be adopting its own time zone — putting the country half an hour behind South Korea and Japan and half an hour ahead of China. Now, this isn’t actually unprecedented; Foreign Policy pointed out that there’s a “long history of what might be described as time zone manipulation … More North Korea and a Christian View of Time
While my job is to teach people about history, my vocation as a parent has made me realize that I know next to nothing about how to teach young children about history. But with our five-year old twins entering kindergarten this fall, I decided to spend this summer trying to understand how children might best learn about the past. Please take the … More 5 Things I’ve Learned about Teaching History to 5-Year Olds
While I’ve produced dozens of hours of podcasts, I don’t actually listen to them all that often. So I thought I’d use this blog to crowdsource a response to a question from a former student of mine. He had just finished listening to the Hardcore History podcast on World War I and was “Curious as to your thoughts … More What Are the Best History Podcasts?
Consider these quotations, coming from two Baptist preachers speaking at either end of the 1960s: 1. …although communism can never be accepted by a Christian, it emphasizes many essential truths that must forever challenge us as Christians. Indeed, it may be that communism is a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and … More Can Culture Call Christians Back to Christ?
Last weekend I took my five-year old children to visit the Twin City Model Railroad Museum in St. Paul, MN. The museum itself has tiny trains endlessly circling an enormous layout of the Twin Cities, set in some vaguely defined (mid-20th century) past. On the walls and in a separate room there are posters, magazines, timetables, and … More Americans Love the Past, Not History
At the end of June I had the chance to spend a few days at Rathbun Lake in southern Iowa, joining my wife’s extended family for a reunion. Of course, even on vacation I couldn’t escape my research. In a part of Iowa most famous in religious history for being part of the Mormon Trail, I turned … More Pietism as Instincts, or It’s More Than Old Churches in Rural Iowa
Here are two top-five lists of college majors. What factor determines the ranking? Law Enforcement & Firefighting 1 English Education 2 History Psychology 3 Visual and Performing Arts Computer Science 4 Economics Medicine and Nursing 5 Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology On the left, the five college majors whose students come from families with the lowest mean household income; … More Is the History Major Dominated by the Upper Middle Class?
The conflict of the Present and the Past, The ideal and the actual in our life, As on a field of battle held me fast, Where this world and the next world were at strife. For, as the valley from its sleep awoke, I saw the iron horses of the steam Toss to the morning air their plumes of smoke, And woke, as one awaketh from a dream. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Monte Cassino“ Almost fifteen hundred years ago a hermit in flight from Rome — “disgusted,” wrote Longfellow, with that city’s “vice and woe” — settled on a mountain in the Abruzzis, forming a community and writing a rule that would make him the father of Western monasticism. … More The Benedict Option
During a visit earlier this year to Pulaski, Virginia, I took a few minutes to survey how the Appalachian town commemorated America’s wars. I found a veterans memorial outside the courthouse, a bridge (see earlier posts on “living memorials“), and a pair of monuments in a park near the post office — one for World War I, and … More What To Do with Confederate Memorials?
This 4th of July weekend I’m feeling more patriotic than I have in years, thanks to two speeches by Pres. Obama. First, his speech this past March at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Obama remembered the civil right activists who fifty years earlier had been brutally attacked during their peaceful march to Montgomery: As … More Patriotism, Love, and Grace: An Independence Day Meditation
The Pietist Schoolman 