Martin Luther King, Jr. has been much on my mind of late. And not just because yesterday marked the 45th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Because I’ve been working on the inaugural edition of the online version of Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture course, which will start — as the face-to-face version has … More The Letter from a Birmingham Jail
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
You and I believe that slavery is wrong, but neither of us came to this conclusion on our own. So starts perhaps my favorite blog post of the year, published last weekend by historian Jay Case (professor at Malone University; author of An Unpredictable Gospel) and entitled, “An Ethical Conviction That You Hold, For Which … More Abolition as Grace
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
Ten years ago today, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), his wife Sheila, his daughter Marcia, and five others died when their small plane crashed en route to Eveleth, MN. Running for a third term in the Senate, Wellstone was scheduled to debate Republican challenger Norm Coleman later that night. It was less than two weeks before … More Paul Wellstone: The Conscience of a Liberal (G.W. Carlson)
Last week I was pleasantly surprised to receive the following query from one of our admissions counselors at Bethel: she had been talking to a prospective student who wondered which major would be most beneficial in preparing someone to fight sex slavery, estimated to be the second largest criminal enterprise in the world today (after … More History and Social Justice
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