Fifty years ago this morning, American national security adviser McGeorge Bundy showed President John F. Kennedy photographs taken by U-2 spy planes that had flown over Cuba two days earlier. CIA analysts concluded that the photos revealed that the Soviet Union had succeeded in deploying medium-range ballistic missiles to bases within mere minutes’ flight of … More The Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 Years Later
Here • One last burst of rating college ratings focused on the use of “comparison groups” by colleges and universities. • In their own return to publishing, Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen examined another return: that of religion to higher education. • It wasn’t a long post, but struggling to pick just nine favorite Bob Dylan … More That Was The Week That Was
Here • My colleague Christian Collins Winn shared his year-opening chapel talk at Bethel, in which he suggested how Pietism might provide a model for civil discourse. (And be sure to check out Brian Gumm’s response to that post at his blog, Restorative Theology. It was certainly gratifying to read that he thinks Christian and … More That Was The Week That Was
We’re one of those households that gets by without cable or satellite. Most of the time, that’s fine with me: Hulu, NetFlix, and digital broadcasting provide more than enough entertainment/information options. But that does mean that I’m missing out on the first of two terrific sporting events to happen in Europe this summer. The London … More The Cold War Continues… in Sports
Summer break has finally begun at Bethel University, and while that means that I’ve got all sorts of scholarly projects underway, it also means that I can take time for some decidedly unacademic pursuits. Like, say, listening to some of the hundreds of albums that I accumulated in the years before becoming a parent of … More Albums A to Z: Aftermath
In which Chris basks in the reflected glory that comes with having been a graduate student of a Pulitzer Prize winner… Lamentably still on my to-be-read-over-the-summer list, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis’ magisterial biography of American diplomat George Kennan was yesterday named the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Called “an engaging … More Congratulations, John Lewis Gaddis!
August 15, 1057 – Macbeth, King of the Scots, dies Seventeen years to the day after King Duncan I died while leading the fight against the forces of Macbeth, the successor himself was mortally wounded in battle. For an update, let’s go to The Pietist Schoolman’s special correspondent, Wm. Shakespeare: DUNSINANE CASTLE – A shocking … More This Week in History
Fifty years ago today, the government of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR, or simply East Germany) cut off its own citizens’ ability to move to the west. Before August 13, 1961, such a journey simply required crossing into West Berlin, then an enclave of the western Federal Republic, surrounded by the Communist GDR and Warsaw … More The Berlin Wall, Fifty Years Later
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