I have larger misgivings about moving more and more of higher ed online (which I’ll explore soon), but this talk given earlier this fall found me beginning to explore its costs and benefits in light of my experience teaching a fully online Western Civ course last summer. This past summer my colleague Sam Mulberry and … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: A Field Report from the Digital Frontier
You generally see the birthdate for the great Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus given as October 27, 1466, but both the day and year are a bit uncertain. So since I don’t blog on Sundays, I’ll take advantage of the confusion and celebrate the second date suggested, October 28th. To be honest, I’d need a lot … More Erasmus: The Christian Scholar’s Scholar
This past summer my colleague Sam Mulberry and I taught the first online version of one of Bethel University’s more venerable courses: GES130 Christianity and Western Culture — a team-taught, multidisciplinary, one-semester Western Civ course taken by something like two-thirds of Bethel students as a foundational experience in the Global Perspectives pillar of Bethel’s gen … More A Field Report from the Digital Frontier: My Experience Teaching Online
Here… • I was reminded that, even in a challenging season for my university, I’ve got a pretty varied, fulfilling job. • But even more encouraging, that Bethel students can articulate the value of the Christian liberal arts even more thoughtfully than their professors. • Though would they think to think of such a model … More That Was The Week That Was
I started this series — introducing American readers to the Second World War as it was fought years before the United States joined the conflict — with Japan’s 1937 offensive against China. Let’s continue with an invasion that’s probably more familiar to most Americans and Europeans: Having already remilitarized the Rhineland (March 1936), absorbed Austria … More The Second World War Before Pearl Harbor: Poland, 1939
I took the picture above during my first tour of the former Ypres battlefield, a key point along the Western Front of World War I. Our tour guide Carl pulled up to a local farmer’s house, opened the garage, and here was a table full of shells, grenades, bullets, and fragments of such ordnance. When … More Iron Harvests: The Death Toll from World War I Continues to Grow
My colleague Sam Mulberry and I are about halfway through the first online version of one of Bethel’s signature courses: GES130 Christianity and Western Culture. (Look for some reflections on that experience in August.) We’ve reconfigured what had been a lecture-discussion course, building it instead around documentary films, virtual museums, and daily writing assignments. We’re … More Happy Birthday, John Calvin
When we walk out of a class, how do we know it was a good one? That question opened my friend David Williams’ talk at our “Pietist Idea of a Christian College” workshop last week. In the end, he concluded that it had little to do with content and everything to do with passion: there’s … More What Is Good Teaching?
Quick: name a really good movie about the American Revolution. Not so easy, is it? In the recent “Real to Reel” episode of the podcast BackStory (H/T John Fea), historian Mark Peterson pointed out how little attention this significant episode in American history has drawn from filmmakers and how lousy most of the rare attempts … More Which Modern War Has Yielded the Best Movies? (part 1)
After taking a day off from social media yesterday as part of the END IT movement’s attempt to draw some attention to the continued enslavement of at least 27 million people around the world, it seems right to return to blogging/Facebooking/Tweeting with something on slavery. But while I think yesterday’s “disappearance” was a well-intended, perhaps … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Abolition as Grace
The Pietist Schoolman 