Here… • The most popular posts in the second year of The Pietist Schoolman more about the Olympics than you’d expect from a blog on Pietism, higher education, and other non-Olympian topics. • Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s a Christ-type with his own Hollywood marketing campaign!! • Last … More That Was The Week That Was
Back when I taught my history of World War I course on campus instead of gallivanting around the Western Front itself, I made extensive use of clips from The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, a documentary miniseries from PBS and the BBC. (It came out in 1996, but the website is … More Why the Middle Ages Could Have Saved Lives in WWI
With two exams to grade at work, it seems like a good moment to rerun some favorite posts from the first three months of 2013. We’ll start by stretching the “Best of The Pietist Schoolman” definition a bit and collate four posts I wrote for our department blog, at different points along the way in … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Teaching WWI in Europe
In 1713 the newly-crowned king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm (Frederick William) I, visited the city of Halle and toured its pioneering educational and charitable institutions. The king’s tour guide was the institutions’ founder, the Pietist pastor August Hermann Francke. Their conversation soon turned to Friedrich Wilhelm’s central concern: the Prussian army. FW: What do you … More Francke and Friedrich Wilhelm: Can Pietists Serve “Two Kingdoms”?
Yesterday I cleared out some intriguing education-related links I didn’t get a chance to blog about during my three weeks teaching in Europe. Today: history! • It’s both hard and easy to believe that the last president of the American Historical Association not to be a research university professor held office during World War II… … More That Was The Month That Was: History
Good to be back home after three weeks in Europe teaching about World War I… I’ll be easing back into blogging this week, starting with a post tomorrow soliciting readers’ thoughts about the questions I’ll be asking Feb. 8-10 when I teach the Winter Seminar at Bethlehem Covenant Church in Minneapolis. Then I’ll stretch out … More Back from Europe!
Nothing says Christmas in this society like rerunning something you’ve already seen before, so enjoy this repeat from December 2011! Ah, Christmas memories from childhood… Playing elf to my pediatrician father’s Santa at the Children’s Hospital party. Honoring my Swedish heritage by choking down one bite of lutefisk every Christmas Eve. Getting a pile of … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: A Very Nazi Christmas!
In less than a month now, fourteen of us from Bethel University will leave for London to start a three-week travel course on the history of World War I. After eight days in England, we’ll cross the Channel to tour battlefield and memorial sites in Belgium and northern France, then wrap up with five days … More Text in Context: Readings for Our World War I Travel Course
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
Today in my Modern Europe class we’re wrapping up a week on the Holocaust by watching a German movie about Sophie Scholl and the other Munich University students who formed the anti-Nazi White Rose movement. It’s as hopeful (and it’s definitely bittersweet) a note on which I dare end so dark a chapter of history. … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Teaching the Holocaust
The Pietist Schoolman 