This week I’m co-leading a faculty development workshop meant to help Bethel colleagues write a tenure application essay on how they relate faith to learning. As that workshop concludes this afternoon, I’ll try to explain our topic in the context of Bethel’s religious heritage. I don’t expect that all of our faculty be Baptist (I’m … More A Pietist (and Baptist) Vision for Academic Freedom
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?
When I wasn’t writing about one of the most famous autodidacts in American history for The Anxious Bench, I spent the week thinking out loud about taking people to Europe to study the history of Christianity and to different parts of the U.S. to study sports history and the Civil War. Elsewhere: • If my tours … More That Was The Week That Was
Here at Pietist Schoolman I previewed a new course on sports history — and debuted its accompanying podcast — and shared some images and thoughts about our January trip to Europe to study the ruins of the world wars. At The Anxious Bench I encouraged fellow evangelicals to check out a new Anabaptist blog. Elsewhere, here’s some … More That Was The Week That Was
“There is a free speech crisis on campus,” wrote Sarah Jones yesterday for The New Republic, “but it’s not at Yale or Middlebury. It’s at Liberty University and schools like it.” In other words, the true threat to free speech in higher education does not come from leftist students and professors trying to stifle conservative voices, but … More Is There a Free Speech Crisis at Christian Colleges?
If you work in a church or Christian non-profit, or care about how those organizations function in the midst of such polarizing times, then you need to take a few minutes and read religion reporter Emma Green’s latest piece for The Atlantic: Donald Trump has divided conservative Christian communities. Most white Christians support Trump, or at … More The Silencing of Conservative Christians Opposed to Trump
Early in professors’ careers, writes Wheaton College biblical scholar Gary Burge, they “must learn the culture in which they work and decide how they are going to fit into the corporate life of the community?” Not only do they need to hone their skills as teachers, continue the research that will earn them tenure, and form important … More Mapping Your Academic Career: Academic Freedom and Institutional Dissonance
Here… • I realized that my sabbatical had temporarily relocated me to a bastion of Donald Trump support. (At least during my sabbatical, I’m planning to move my week-in-review posts from Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon.) • Our friend Jared Burkholder was back with an open letter to David Barton about primary sources. I’ll have my … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • In the running centenary commemoration of World War I, yesterday was a particularly important moment to remember. • Maybe especially because it came just over a week after British voters — including nearly 60% of Christians — decided their country should leave a European Union whose leading member is Germany. • I tried … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • Before I get to more recent links… Today my colleague Stacey Hunter Hecht would have turned 48. In case you missed it, I wrote not long ago about how mourning her death (and that of our mutual colleague G.W. Carlson) has reshaped some of my thinking about what it means to be a historian. … More That Was The Week That Was
The Pietist Schoolman 