Category: History

Screen shot from "The Reformation Polka"

This Day in History: “Papal Bulls, Indulgences, and Transubstantiation!”

October 31, 2011

Happy Reformation Day, everyone! My friend Sam and I made this video for Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class several years ago. (The words are by a Lutheran pastor from Iowa.) Remarkably, it’s now been seen well over 120,000 times on YouTube, and it never fails that we run into or hear from excited students … More This Day in History: “Papal Bulls, Indulgences, and Transubstantiation!”

Thomas Cooper

Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”

October 25, 2011

In the last two weeks of my Modern Europe course, we’ve twice run headlong into the hardest question historians ask: Why? First, I had my students read The Dynamite Club, John Merriman’s account of Émile Henry, a young French anarchist who threw a bomb into a crowded Paris café in 1894 — thereby, in John’s … More Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”

Religion of the Heart

October 18, 2011

10/18/11 – My colleague Chris Armstrong (who blogs at Grateful to the dead) has just posted a wonderfully erudite and accessible four-part series on Christian “religion of the heart,” making the case that Pietists stand with a long line of Christians (Peter, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Siena, Martin Luther, Puritans, John Wesley) who … More Religion of the Heart

Old School Ivy League: The Yale Report of 1828

October 18, 2011

As historians go, I’m not much of an antiquarian. Since I mostly study the 20th century, I’m little more than a glorified journalist in the eyes of some peers. And I don’t collect first editions or enjoy antiquing. But I’m grateful to my colleague Steve Keillor for passing along excerpts from the 1828 Yale Report. … More Old School Ivy League: The Yale Report of 1828

The Wren Building

This Week in History

October 17, 2011

October 17, 1660 – Nine “Regicides” are drawn and quartered At the conclusion of the English Civil War in 1649, Parliament appointed “commissioners” to sit in judgment of the defeated king Charles I. He was sentenced to death, with the warrant signed by fifty-nine men. When the monarchy was restored under Charles’ son in 1660, … More This Week in History

Palayur Church

Clouds of Witnesses: “Failure” in India

October 15, 2011

After a multi-week hiatus, I’ve finally got a chance to return to our series blogging through Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (InterVarsity Press). If you’re just joining the conversation, you can find the beginning of the series here. We’re moving from Africa to India, which will … More Clouds of Witnesses: “Failure” in India

Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

The Long Peace

October 12, 2011

Is humanity becoming more peaceful? Yes, says psychologist Steven Pinker in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking), glowingly reviewed by bioethicist Peter Singer in this past Sunday’s The New York Times. You’ve got to be kidding, replies philosopher John Gray, reviewing the same book earlier this fall … More The Long Peace