Yesterday I was given the honor of delivering the keynote address at the college faculty retreat for Bethel University. The retreat committee asked me to speak on the theme of unity. Here’s a lightly edited version of my comments. I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the … More “Let the Tension Remain” (Eph. 4)
As I mentioned earlier this summer, historians at Bethel are now part of a larger Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Science, with each of those core majors — plus three of our interdisciplinary programs — culminating in a common capstone course that I’ll be teaching this fall: Applied Humanities Seminar. For the most part, I’m … More What Are “Applied Humanities”?
Last week I shared the acknowledgments section from my biography of Charles Lindbergh. Today, a few words about the dedication: In honor of another descendant of Swedish immigrants:Dick Peterson—for whom physics is an act of worship,whose career confirms Anne Lindbergh’s instinct that“the true scientist [is] akin to the artist and the saint,”whose life demonstrates that … More Why I Dedicated a Charles Lindbergh Biography to Dick Peterson
I’m not sure exactly what it will look like given Minnesota’s current COVID numbers, but three weeks from today begins the 2021-22 academic year at Bethel University. This fall I’m teaching two courses I’ve taught many times before — our first-year GES130 Christianity and Western Culture survey and my third-year course HIS354 Modern Europe — and … More Introducing… Applied Humanities Seminar
As I did with my last two books on Pietism, I’m posting here the Acknowledgments section of my Charles Lindbergh biography. I suspect that many of those mentioned here have ordered the book anyway, but I never want people to have to spend money in order to receive thanks. I usually end this part of … More Acknowledgments from My Biography of Charles Lindbergh
If things seems quiet here at Pietist Schoolman, it’s because I’ve been busy over at another blog: CC 4th, the site I’ve been administering for my department since 2012. See, this is the week we announced that “my department” at Bethel is no longer History, but History, Philosophy, and Political Science. While the past few … More Reflections on a Departmental Merger
I’ll never forget February 1, 2016. I had just got back from the first meeting of a spring course and barely sat down in my office when the phone rang: G.W. Carlson had had a stroke. I was stunned. Not just because GW was my friend and mentor, or because he had seemed so hale … More Five Years Later… The Legacy of GW Carlson
We’ve still got some one-on-one meetings left to go, but today was the last full meeting of my Fog of War class. I always struggle to know how to wrap things up, especially after a course as wide-ranging as this one and after a semester as pandemic-shaped as this fall. But it occurred to me … More Education as Thinking about Dying
We’ve now finished the first two weeks of the fall semester at Bethel University, where there’s no football opener tomorrow, only a handful of people could be in the Great Hall for a chapel service saying farewell to our president emeritus, and I still forget my face mask half the time I head to work. … More Two Weeks In and…
This week I learned about a pagan, white supremacist movement that is rededicating a church in Minnesota and looked at how Bethel and its peers scored on a financial stress test. Elsewhere: • Bethel caught flak on social media for establishing a scholarship named after George Floyd, but to his great credit, our new president … More That Was The Week That Was
