It’s hard for me to get too excited about January 1st. I mean, it’s as good an arbitrary point as any to change calendars. So long as we bracket off the fact that — beyond the West — it’s a kind of vestige of colonialism to use that calendar in the first place. So long … More Is New Year’s Day a “Christian Holiday”?
Welcome again Jared Burkholder of Grace College and Seminary, who will be blogging in this space every other Friday. Jared’s first post jumps off from a new book on the martyrdom of eight Jesuit missionaries martyred in mid-17th century Canada. The Cushwa Center at the University of Notre Dame held its fall Seminar in American Religion … More Historian Emma Anderson and the “Afterlife” of Martyrdom
Today I’ll recap the third of my three talks delivered on May 5-6 for Salem Covenant Church’s annual family camp, in the northern Minnesota woods at Covenant Pines Bible Camp. The overriding theme was to encourage Christian non-historians to approach church history with the same zeal that many of them apply to family history. I … More Church History as Family History (part 3)
As I mentioned here Monday, I spent last weekend presenting a three-part talk on church history to fellow members of Salem Covenant Church during our annual “family camp.” I’ll recap it in two three parts, starting today. Now, these talks are supposed to be “inspiring,” which is not a mode I normally think of as … More Church History as Family History (part 1)
Last week I mentioned that I was preparing to preach a sermon for the first time, at Salem Covenant Church of New Brighton, MN on All Saints’ Sunday. Despite my fears, it seemed to go well yesterday, and I thought I’d post my text in case anyone who wasn’t there was interested in reading it. … More A Stretched People
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
The Pietist Schoolman 