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
It’s good to be back blogging full-time after a quiet December and a total hiatus the first half of January. Somehow we kept getting a steady number of hits during that period, to the point that we’ll actually be welcoming our 15,000th visitor sometime today! Thanks to everyone for reading!! What you might have missed … More That Was The Week That Was
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
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
What you might have missed last week, first here at The Pietist Schoolman and then around the blogosphere: Here Reading Carolyn Weber’s Surprised by Oxford in light of memoirs by Augustine of Hippo and Frederick Buechner had me thinking about how hard it can be to talk about loving God with those I most love. … More That Was the Week That Was
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
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
9/5/11 – How is Labor Day observed, or not observed? Nathan Gilmour asks about churches; John Fea about colleges and schools (Bethel is off, for the record); and Will McDonald has a long, excellent piece lamenting that Major League Baseball pays so little attention to this holiday, unlike Memorial Day or Independence Day (H/T Craig … More Labor Day Silences
Labor Day Edition September 5, 1882 – New York City hosts America’s first Labor Day parade Here’s how the New York Times began its report on the proceedings: The parade of the working men yesterday, although not so large as its organizers had predicted, was conducted in an orderly and pleasant manner. Those who rode … More This Week in History
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”
The Pietist Schoolman 