UPDATE (January 3, 2023): I’m afraid I’ve had to cancel this tour. I’ll be leading a private tour in 2024, but if you’re interested in what we’re considering for 2025 and 2026, click here. For most of the 2010s, my Bethel colleague Sam Mulberry and I had the joy of leading a biennial travel course … More Announcing Our June 2023 Tour of Germany
Buchenwald was one of the most infamous concentration camps in the Nazi system, the final resting place of over fifty thousand victims. But until my colleague Sam Mulberry and I went there last month on our week-long tour of Germany, I didn’t know all that much about Buchenwald — including the fact that it has two … More When One Dictatorship Commemorated Resistance to Another
No, it’s not unexpected that the capital of Germany would have commemorative sites related to World War I. But the ways that the memory of that war show up in Berlin can catch you off guard, as I discovered on my recent tour. Amazingly, I’d never been to Berlin, so we started by orienting ourselves … More Unexpected Sites of WWI Remembrance: Berlin
This week I shared a Lenten devotional that I created with colleagues on the Bethel faculty — one that made me think of former Bethel president George Brushaber, whose memorial service was last Sunday — and I took my turn to write the lead essay in our Following Jesus conversation, “A Week in the Life of … More That Was The Week That Was
Any reasonable, empathetic person can find any number of reasons to find troubling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The suffering, dislocation, and grief that any war inflicts on anyone in its path. The odiousness of Vladimir Putin, who had the gall to say that one goal of his “special military operation” was the “denazification” of Ukraine: … More Thoughts on Ukraine
This week I reported on my adult Sunday School class about evangelicalism and checked in on how Lutherans follow Jesus, while a couple of student journalists at Bethel wrote about me and my new book… which was reviewed in Front Porch Republic and the Portland (ME) Press Herald. Elsewhere: • If you’re not already reading … More That Was The Week That Was
This week I tried to excite incoming Christian college students about academics, announced my participation in an ecumenical conversation about Jesus (more on that here next week), launched a launch team for my next book (two or three spots still open!), recorded a podcast about the politics of the Olympics, and asked whether it’s possible … More That Was The Week That Was
Even as we start to get back to something like a pre-COVID normal, this summer I want to do even more of one of my chief pandemic hobbies: reading books. Here’s some of what’s on my reading list for the next three months. History Most of my more academic reading will be devoted to boning … More What I’m Hoping to Read This Summer
This week I invited readers to help me launch a new book project, opened a Lenten devotional series from the Conference on Faith and History and recorded a podcast about the National Anthem and athlete protests. Elsewhere: • For Democratic voters in New York, complained one Slate columnist, “celebrating the idea of the competent blue-state governor … More That Was The Week That Was
This week I reflected on what I learned from Esau McCaulley’s book, Reading While Black and celebrated the publication of our own book, Faith and History: A Devotional. Elsewhere: • We have one more week of fall classes remaining, which makes this a good time to think about the importance of how we end a semester. … More That Was The Week That Was
The Pietist Schoolman 