This entire week in history is special because of what happened in 1582, when the Catholic countries of southern Europe (plus Poland) became the first to adopt the new calendar decreed by Pope Gregory XIII and so move off of the old Julian calendar. The “Gregorian” calendar was designed to ensure that vernal equinox fell … More This Week in History
Hank Williams, Jr. stirred up a fracas this past week by likening Barack Obama playing golf with Speaker of the House John Boehner to Adolf Hitler playing golf with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Not following the analogy? From the Bocephus SAT Prep Guide answer section… Obama:Hitler::Boehner:Netanyahu.) (On overly facile Nazi analogies, check out the … More The Worst Person Before Hitler
There haven’t been a lot of reader comments in the last couple of weeks, probably because I’ve been bloviating so much about disparate topics. So this afternoon I’ll (mostly) keep my opinions to myself and invite responses to questions relating to this big one: Does your church value church history? This question occurs to me … More Does Your Church Value Church History?
Along with the course-related podcasts I’ve helped to produce, our department also makes use of this technology to communicate with current, former, and prospective students, putting out Historia! twice last year and, hopefully, three times in 2011-2012. In time for Bethel’s Homecoming, the first episode for this year is now available on iTunes U, and … More The Return of Historia!
As it happened, I read the third part of Carolyn Weber’s Surprised by Oxford (“Christmastide,” which finds her returning home to Canada during a break in Oxford’s schedule) the same week that my friend Sam taught our Christianity and Western Culture class about Augustine of Hippo, the North African theologian and bishop whose Confessions is … More Surprised by Oxford: Christmastide
Recently I concluded a series elaborating on a talk I gave last spring at Bethel University: “In Search of a ‘Usable Past’: Pietism in the Historiography of Christian Colleges and Universities.” If you missed some or all of the series, you can find the entries indexed here, with sample quotations: 1. The Usable Past of … More The Usable Past: An Overview
Today I’m going to wrap up a series of posts on the notion of Christian colleges looking to a “usable past” for guidance as they consider their missions and identities. Thus far, we’ve mostly found that schools founded by denominations originating (at least in part) in Pietism have not found such utility in that tradition. … More The Usable Past: Pietism and Bethel University
In my first and second posts about Africa in this series blogging through Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (InterVarsity Press), we’ve seen African Christians relating to colonial authorities and Western culture in a variety of ways: Bernard Mizeki, so closely aligned with British Anglican leaders that … More Clouds of Witnesses: Politics and Protest in Postcolonial Africa
9/21/11 – This Friday I’ll have a post about Pietism in the history and identity of Bethel University. On October 1st, I’ll join two of my co-editors from The Pietist Impulse in Christianity in leading a discussion about the same topic as part of Bethel’s Homecoming festivities. You can get details on our Facebook event … More The Pietist Impulse in Bethel History
September 19, 1945 – “Lord Haw Haw” is sentenced to death One of the courses I teach at Bethel University is the capstone of our major program, Senior Seminar, in which students spend the spring semester conducting original research on a topic of their choosing, produce an article-length paper, and close the year by giving … More This Week in History
The Pietist Schoolman 