If you’re not a member of the American Historical Association (AHA), you might not have heard that our guild is in the middle of a fracas heated enough to have generated its own hashtag: #AHAgate. Or perhaps you have, since it attracted the attention of the New York Times on Monday. Quick version: nine days … More The Underquestioned Assumption at the Heart of #AHAgate
Just two days after announcing via his Twitter feed that he had stage 4 cancer, Dallas Willard died yesterday. At the end of this post, I’ll offer my own small contribution to the collection of tributes that is already proliferating, but first a few words from people who knew him well: • Richard Foster wrote … More RIP Dallas Willard (1935-2013)
Today’s not-quite rerun revisits one of my favorite hissy fits, directed against an op-ed arguing that those of my profession don’t work hard enough. Original post: “Do college professors work hard enough?” Follow up: Nate Kreuter, “The Math Doesn’t Work” (Inside Higher Ed, April 22) It took me about a year, but sometime during spring … More Following Up: How Hard Do College Professors Work?
I’ll be honest: the primary point of this post is to cover one English major at Bethel with so much praise that she’ll feel compelled to take at least one History course from me before she graduates. But in the process, readers not named Abby Stocker might also find themselves reappraising their assumptions about what … More Students as Scholars
Perhaps no book has done more to make me think anew about my vocation as a Christian historian than Confessing History (Univ. of Notre Dame Press). So as I sought points of entry for discussing that topic in my promotion essay, I took some inspiration from a piece in the January/February 2012 issue of Books … More The Vocation of a Christian Historian: Seeking and Telling Truth
3/5/13 – I’ll be giving a talk on “Blogging, Scholarship, and Teaching” this Thursday morning, 10:15-11:00, in the Bethel University Library. If you can’t make it, I’ll be sure to pass along a link to any video that gets uploaded.
I’m up for promotion this year, and so had to write a lengthy faith-learning integration essay describing how I “[bring] the perspective of a Christian worldview to bear on scholarship and teaching” and reflecting an “increasing maturity in one’s discipline and faith….” I don’t intend to publish the entire (thirty-page) thing here, but I did … More The Vocation of a Christian Historian: Calling and Callings
I’ve enjoyed William Cronon‘s tenure as much as that of any prior president of the American Historical Association (AHA), not least because he’s used the platform so effectively to encourage his fellow historians to rethink their role in the digital age and to take advantage of its possibilities (even Wikipedia). So it was good to … More William Cronon on Historians and Teaching
If a scholar blogs, is it scholarship? When I started this enterprise in the summer of 2011, it never occurred to me to think of blogging as a form of scholarship. “A good way to cultivate the discipline of writing,” to implement the commonplace advice “that the best way to learn writing is to write”? … More Blogging: “Public Thinking” as “Digital Scholarship”?
Once I deliver my paper on Pietism at Bethel University tomorrow morning, my attention will shift to a different kind of writing project: an essay on the integration of learning and Christian faith in support of an application for promotion in faculty rank. I long ago decided that I was going to write my promotion … More Thoughts from CFH 2012: Tracy McKenzie’s Presidential Address
The Pietist Schoolman 