Next month my colleague Sam Mulberry and I are again taking a group of Bethel University students on a three-week trip to Europe to study the history of World War I. I’m especially excited to be in Europe during the first year of the war’s ongoing centenary, and will try to find a way to … More All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914
Twenty-five years ago this Sunday, about 20,000 people from the east side of Berlin walked over to the west. Of course, this kind of population movement happens every day in every city in the world, as urbanites go to work, eat out, visit friends, attend plays, etc. But Berlin of 1989 was a famously bifurcated city, with a 28-year old wall … More Twenty-Five Years after the Wall
Today I’m happy to present a guest post on J. S. Bach and Pietism. It comes from Chuck King, visiting assistant professor of music at Trinity International University, where he teaches courses in music and worship and music history, as well as directing the Symphonic Band. He has three decades of experience as a pastoral minister … More Bach and Pietism (Chuck King)
Coming into this centenary year for World War I, there’s been a predictable resurgence of books written about that conflict. Which got me wondering how the war has ebbed and flowed over time as a subject for historians and other writers. I came up with two highly imperfect ways to satisfy this curiosity: I was challenged earlier this summer … More Tracking the Popularity of WWI in Books and Dissertations
It is a date that marks the start of events that would go on to change the course of millions of lives – tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the day Britain declared war on Germany and the First World War began. So said Britain’s The Independent, yesterday, of today. But is August 4, 1914 — with its … More When Did World War I Begin?
Here… • I could think of worse things than spending two days in Malibu, California talking about how historians use social media or help institutions manage change. • A Pietist model of Christian scholarship: scholarship that transforms scholars, and might not center on the production of knowledge. (Part three in that series will look to the … More That Was The Week That Was
In the first part of this post, I offered a Pietist critique of “the integration of faith and learning.” Today, as I continue to rework my recent presentation to Bethel’s annual faith-learning faculty workshop, I’ll tentatively suggest how Pietism might offer an alternative to the “integrationist” model of Christian scholarship. (I had intended this to be a … More A Pietist Model of Christian Scholarship: Transformation and Character
Seventy years ago today, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy — opening the long-promised “second front” in the European experience of World War II and ultimately sealing the fate of the Third Reich. There’s plenty of coverage of the anniversary — let me just suggest a few links: • The Washington Post has a striking photo … More D-Day at 70
Yesterday Thomas Kidd’s interview of Philip Jenkins, his fellow Anxious Bencher, further whetted my appetite for Jenkins’ new book on religion and World War I, The Great and Holy War. But I was mostly struck by the way Jenkins pushed back against Kidd’s statement that “WWI is often remembered for unprecedented, but often pointless carnage, especially in the notorious experiences … More Was WWI “Pointless Carnage”?
Today’s must-read article comes from Anne Applebaum, pointing to a perhaps underreported dimension of the crisis in Syria: mass starvation brought about by the policies of Bashar al-Assad. While the international community is haggling over [Assad’s] chemical weapons, the stuff of modern nightmares, he is following the example of his medieval and his 20th-century predecessors and … More Starvation as a Weapon
The Pietist Schoolman 