This morning I gave the second in a series of talks at the Bethel University Library that will preview chapters from our forthcoming Whole and Holy Persons: A Pietist Approach to Christian Higher Education. My topic was “Pietism from the High Sierra to the Somme: Holistic Education in the Ecclesiola of Off-Campus Study.” This is … More My Talk on Pietism and Off-Campus Study: In Tweet Form
My time at Bethel didn’t prepare me to do any specific job, but it prepared me to be the person that I am. Fun as it is for a college professor like me to explore metaphors for the Christian liberal arts — spiritual retreat, cathedral construction, and a Lord of the Rings-like quest — it’s … More The Value of the Christian Liberal Arts: A Bethel Alum Speaks
How’s this for a college recruitment slogan? “Bethel University: you might not come back, but you will not be the same” No? What if we had Sir Ian McKellen intone it, as in the first part of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, when Martin Freeman’s Bilbo is being encouraged by McKellen’s wizard Gandalf to go … More The Christian Liberal Arts as Tolkienesque Quest
I should note that the past week brought this blog its 100,000th view. Thanks to everyone for reading! But more importantly: Here… • I joined several others in getting the word out that Books & Culture is facing its last issue if it doesn’t make its 2014 fundraising goal by the 9th. They’d made progress … More That Was The Week That Was
On Friday I led our department’s welcome sessions for new majors. For a while now I’ve made sure to dedicate part of that time to preemptively addressing the concern, “What do I do with a History major?” We’ve got better at making what sound to us like effective arguments — ruthlessly pragmatic explanations of the … More Christian Liberal Arts as Cathedral-Building
I’m about to head up to the second and final day of Bethel‘s annual faculty retreat, a venerable tradition meant to help us reconnect after a summer away, engage in some professional development (e.g., yesterday I sat in on a session about open access publishing and digital humanities), hear from our leaders, and worship together. … More The Christian Liberal Arts as Spiritual Retreat
I fear that those of us who teach history, literature, philosophy, languages, etc. too often tend to say “the liberal arts” when we really mean “the humanities” — forgetting that the latter is only one set of disciplines within the former. I’m as guilty as anyone. A long time ago, I imprecisely used the tag … More The Sciences as Liberal Arts
A brief follow-up to Tuesday’s post, “The Humanities in Crisis, or Not“… Historian Ben Schmidt (by way of journalist Jordan Weissmann) argued that any fear that the humanities (history, philosophy, literature, languages) are in crisis should be tempered by the reality that (aside from an outlying boom that peaked in 1966) those disciplines have about … More Curriculum and the Health of the Humanities
Last week was a great-horrible week for those of us who teach fields like history, philosophy, languages, and literature (hereafter, “the humanities”) and wanted to be reminded (a) how essential we are and (b) how much of a crisis we’re in. Among other happenings, the New York Times published a column by David Brooks lamenting … More The Humanities in Crisis, or Not
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
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