Having started the week by sharing an article questioning whether we really ever learn “lessons” from the past, let me close the week by considering another way that Americans commonly try to make the past useful: by deploying it as a rhetorical weapon in the most heated debates of the present day. Two versions of this come up a lot. … More The Wrong Side of History
Here… • What’s the Evangelical Covenant Church? Answer #2: “an immigrant church,” both rooted in Swedish-American history and being reshaped into a truly multiethnic body. • I started a new series on the newest book from ECC communications director Edward Gilbreath, about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” …There and Everywhere • We’re starting … More That Was The Week That Was
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
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!
I know that Godwin’s law pertains to Internet discussions, but perhaps it’s also true that the closer we get to a vote on a contentious issue in the culture wars, “the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Take, for example, the state of Minnesota, whose voters will be asked to answer … More For the Last Time, It’s Not a Good Idea to Make Nazi Analogies
One of my favorite blogs is Past Imperfect, produced by the Smithsonian Magazine and featuring terrifically well-written stories about a fascinating array of historical subjects. (A piece on female pirates won one of the last Cliopatria awards for historical blogging before Cliopatria closed down.) Well-researched but accessible, I’ve taken to recommending several of its best posts … More Nazi Jazz
When I take students to Europe next January to study the history of World War I, we’ll close the journey (as my wife and I did this month) in Munich — primarily to consider how WWI led to the rise of fascist movements and thence to World War II and the Holocaust. But we’ll also … More Commemorating WWI: Munich
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 Reader’s Digest books about topics like natural disasters and true crime from Grandpa Gehrz the next morning… Good times. And … More A Very Nazi Christmas!
The Pietist Schoolman 