It’s not quite the most wonderful day of the year, but the day after the Super Bowl is one of my favorites. The moment when football finally cedes the sporting spotlight and makes room for the true National Pastime to return from hibernation. Back in 1987 Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post famously rattled off … More Super Monday
Feels like the blog’s been a little too focused on history of late, so I’m dwelling a bit more on current events and popular culture this week. And, at the risk of my least favorite of the four major professional team sports showing up in this blog’s tag cloud, that attitude seems to beg a … More Tebow
Some quick thoughts about what’s happened at Penn State in recent days, including the student rioting last night… First, I feel for people like sportswriter Michael Weinreb, who experienced an idyllic upbringing in State College — his father was on the Penn State faculty — and had a good experience at PSU himself. Despite that … More Unhappy Valley
10/10/11 – For some reason, the top post here the last few days has been one that I did nearly a month ago critiquing “muscular Christianity.” In light of the apparent mini-surge of interest in that topic, let me also recommend today’s New York Times article on Nathan Whitaker, the Duke- and Harvard-educated author who … More More on Muscular Christianity
If I could do it all over again, I might be a sports historian. Growing up, I was an indifferent athlete but an inveterate fan: able to play just about every sport, but none of them well (though I did manage to letter twice in baseball, which tells you a lot about my alma mater‘s … More Beyond Muscular Christianity
Last month I felt like I was living a John Denver song: country roads taking me to a colleague’s farm near St. Cloud, Minnesota, to the Washington County Fair in Lake Elmo, MN, and then last week to the Minnesota State Fair. (Well, a couple of city streets took me there.) Then last week my … More “God Made the Country”
It’s been a pretty tough summer for us Minnesota Twins fans. We got spoiled just enough to start complaining that the team was only winning divisions, not getting deep into the playoffs. Expectations thus raised, we naturally got hit with a season in which there were so many injuries that half the time it felt … More 600 and 3000
A series of posts taking you day-by-day through a proposed travel version of my course HIS230L World War I. Read the introduction to the series here, or the previous post here. Wednesday, January 16, 2013 – Paris You wouldn’t think that the seemingly random combination of these four words could yield 2.1 million hits on … More “Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys”
Did you know? The members of the NHL champion Boston Bruins will have three full months between their Game 7 triumph and the beginning of training camp in which to play golf, go to the beach, and do silly things with the Stanley Cup. (Of course, members of my Minnesota Wild and the league’s thirteen … More My Summer Vacation
So, what’s this blog about? Well, I’m not about to to reject advice from anyone who can write a book about sabermetric analysis compelling enough to be turned into a Brad Pitt vehicle. Alas, another geeky guy who watches The Office mostly because of Jenna Fischer already has an incredibly well-written, long-established blog on baseball, … More Write What You Know
The Pietist Schoolman 