In a field outside the Belgian town of Ieper (or Ypres), one comes across a curious but moving sight: a wooden cross, with soccer balls piled at its base. The cross is carved to read: 1914 The Khaki Chums Christmas Truce 1999 85 Years Lest we forget It stands in what used to be No … More Commemorating World War I: “Lest We Forget”
A year from now my colleague Sam Mulberry and I will lead a group of twenty Bethel University students on a three-week journey that will take us from London to Paris to Munich, plus a few days on the ground of what was, from August 1914 to November 1918, the Western Front of World War … More In the Footsteps of WWI
Okay, my last word clouds for 2011 — I promise! It’s probably obvious that the first has to do with Kim Jong-il and the second with Vaclav Havel. While the North Korean dictator was reported to have died on Saturday and the Czech playwright-president passed away on Sunday, their obituaries happened to appear side by … More Kim and Havel
At the turn of the 20th century, the catchphrase of many German nationalists was that their nation deserved its “place in the sun,” its turn in world history to take on a leading role. For example, defending his government’s attempts to expand Germany’s presence in East Asia in 1897, chancellor Bernhard von Bülow vowed that … More Germany’s Place in the Sun
Last week here at The Pietist Schoolman and elsewhere: Here Why the Evangelical Covenant Church has typically viewed activities like packing meals for hungry children in Africa as going hand in hand with conversionism, biblicism, and other hallmarks of evangelicalism No This Week in History but one day in the United Nations’ history brought to … More That Was The Week That Was
This entire week in history is special because of what happened in 1582, when the Catholic countries of southern Europe (plus Poland) became the first to adopt the new calendar decreed by Pope Gregory XIII and so move off of the old Julian calendar. The “Gregorian” calendar was designed to ensure that vernal equinox fell … More This Week in History
A very special week in history, since we start with… August 29, 2011 – I make my 100th post at The Pietist Schoolman Namely, this one. How to properly assess the historical significance of this moment as compared to the other landmarks we’ll be commemorating today? Well, only time will tell, but I think we … More This Week in History
The other day I mentioned that I was in the middle of writing my syllabus for HIS354 Modern Europe, one of the staples of my courseload at Bethel University. As any teacher reading this knows, offering the same class year in and year out can be the bane of one’s existence. It can become numbing … More The Blessings of Teaching the Same Course Again and Again
As we’ve already heard from Roger Olson, Pietism is often caricatured as being anti-intellectual, and Pietists as being so concerned to avoid head-centered “dead orthodoxy” that they substitute heart-centered emotional subjectivism. In part three of our series previewing chapters in our new book, The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, we find that tension, but more importantly, … More The Pietist Impulse: Modernity
I’m very reluctant to comment on last Friday’s tragic events in Norway. (1) The story is still evolving. (2) I’m not an expert on Norway, or on right-wing extremism in Europe. And (3) as a historian, I’d always prefer to analyze events from a temporal distance. But… I do teach modern European history regularly, and … More Norway: “A Very Old War”
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