As a teacher, I grow restless easily, tinkering for the sake of tinkering. But even in those classes that I teach yearly or semesterly, there are certain fine-tuned exercises that I expect to repeat for years to come. One of those happened last week in my upper-division survey of modern European history, when after one … More Ordinary Men: Empathy and Judgment in the History of the Holocaust
While I work on another post for Tuesday, enjoy this post from last fall prompted by the collision of a couple of discussions in one of my signature courses at Bethel. In the last two weeks of my Modern Europe course, we’ve twice run headlong into the hardest question historians ask: Why? First, I had … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”
Last week I was pleasantly surprised to receive the following query from one of our admissions counselors at Bethel: she had been talking to a prospective student who wondered which major would be most beneficial in preparing someone to fight sex slavery, estimated to be the second largest criminal enterprise in the world today (after … More History and Social Justice
Last Friday I posted a Wilfred Owen poem, Owen being the greatest poet of World War I and November 11 being the day (a week after Owen’s death) that the fighting on the Western Front ended — and the day that people around the world still commemorate as Remembrance Day (or, in this country, Veterans’ … More Chamberlain and Churchill: Empathy, Judgment, and Hindsight Bias
In the last two weeks of my Modern Europe course, we’ve twice run headlong into the hardest question historians ask: Why? First, I had my students read The Dynamite Club, John Merriman’s account of Émile Henry, a young French anarchist who threw a bomb into a crowded Paris café in 1894 — thereby, in John’s … More Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”
The Pietist Schoolman 