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
Earlier this week, Hechinger Report published an analysis of the economic problems facing many colleges and universities in this country. Readers of this blog know that this isn’t a new topic (here’s a 2014 analysis of financial sustainability), but “with the added pressures of the coronavirus pandemic,” began Sarah Butrymowicz and Pete D’Amato, “the fabric of American … More How Christian Colleges Fare Under a Financial Stress Test
Earlier today I enjoyed listening to my friend Kristin Kobes Du Mez take questions from Minnesota Public Radio listeners about her new book, Jesus and John Wayne. That I’ve gotten to know historians and professors as gifted as Kristin is one of the many benefits I enjoy as part of the crew at The Anxious … More Can Christian Women and Men Be Friends?
The weeks before I first took students to Europe for a travel course, I often woke up in the middle of the night, unable to stop thinking about our plans — and what would happen when the plans went awry. The same thing has been happening in recent days, as we get closer and closer … More How I’m Planning to Teach This Fall
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
Today Amy Poppinga and I wrapped up our podcast series on Pandemics and the Liberal Arts with an episode on art. Thanks to our Bethel colleagues Amanda Hamilton and Wayne Roosa for a really rich conversation about the importance of art within the larger curriculum of the liberal arts, how art has provided catharsis and … More Wednesday’s Podcast: Art and Pandemics
As we reach the last week of spring classes at Bethel, Chris and I devoted part of this week’s episode of The 252 to talking our students through their final exam. But the rest of you will want to listen in for what follows: a conversation about e-sports with our Bethel colleague Adrian Smithee, who has … More Thursday’s Podcast: E-Sports
