I’m delighted — and somewhat surprised — to announce that I’ll be taking my next tour group to Europe in June 2024. Somewhat surprised? Let me explain. For a while now, I’ve been talking with my mom about the possibility of traveling together in Sweden, the land of her immigrant ancestors. As we brainstormed, that turned … More Announcing My June 2024 Tour: Scandinavia
It’s not how I wanted to head into 2023, but I need to cancel our planned June tour of Germany. In the end, there just wasn’t enough customer interest to support even a scaled-down version of what I had in mind, so I’ve refunded deposits and will return any late-arriving checks. It may be that … More Cancelling Our Germany 2023 Tour… But Planning Our Return to Europe
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
This week: a Bethel colleague and I launched a new podcast meant to help Christians thinking about college, and I recorded an hour-long conversation about Ukraine with two other Bethel colleagues. Elsewhere: • Here’s a historical analogy I didn’t muse about in our Ukraine podcast: is Volodymyr Zelensky the 21st century version of Lajos Kossuth? • I … More That Was The Week That Was
This week I mourned a friend who died too young, wrote about the 100th birthday of “Western civ,” preached and taught for Reformation Sunday, and interviewed a college football coach who sees his work as a ministry. Elsewhere: • I’ll post the full text of my sermon (on Psalm 46) at The Anxious Bench this Tuesday, but … More That Was The Week That Was
On the last full day of our January travel course on World War I, we take our students to Munich’s modern art museum and ask them to write about whichever work best reflects what’s on their minds at the end of three weeks of studying total war and genocide. If I’d completed that assignment myself, … More Europe in Ruins: A Photo Essay
As announced here two weeks ago, I’m going to lead an eleven-day tour of England, Belgium, France, and Germany next June: “The World Wars in Western Europe.” There are still openings, but I’d suggest that you apply sooner than later: Bethel University will be mentioning the trip next month in its alumni e-newsletter. For the … More Introducing Pietist Schoolman Travel
Every other January since 2013, my Bethel colleague Sam Mulberry and I have taken students to Europe for a three-week course on the history of the two world wars. Whether we’re in Trafalgar Square or at a Canadian memorial in France or on the chilling grounds of Dachau, that travel course has become my favorite kind … More Announcing My “World Wars in Western Europe” Trip – June 6-16, 2019
As you might have noticed yesterday, I enjoy fusing my interests in history and travel. Besides writing about Moravian Bethlehem, I’ve used this blog to share images and thoughts from trips to the Blue Ridge Mountains, the former Western Front, and a few of the many historic sites I’ve taken our kids over the years. (And to … More Looking for Some Historic Sites to Visit This Summer?
“[T]he most distinctive feature of history as an academic discipline,” I once argued, “is the relative paucity of the sources available. All we’ve got to go on are whatever artifacts survive the passing of time, and most of those sources erode. Past supporting preservation and archival efforts (including oral history projects), there’s not much historians can do … More Why We Can Remember the Holocaust
The Pietist Schoolman 