For our second guest post of the week, I’m happy to welcome Aaron Morrison to the blog. Aaron is a Residential Education Coordinator for the Department of Residential Education at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, NE. He received his M.A. in Higher Education Administration from Taylor University and a B.S. from Indiana Wesleyan University. He … More Revitalizing Chapel Exercises (Aaron Morrison)
In the middle of what’s obviously been a very busy week for the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU), its new vice president for academic affairs, Rick Ostrander, was kind enough to answer a few questions via e-mail — about the debate that led to the departure of four schools from the consortium and his vision … More An Interview with CCCU Academic VP Rick Ostrander
Today I’m happy to share a guest post by George Demetrion: a review essay on Philipp Jakob Spener’s 1675 work, Pia Desideria, originally written while George was auditing my colleague Glen Scorgie’s Pietism course at Bethel Seminary San Diego. The author of In Quest of a Vital Protestant Center: An Ecumenical Evangelical Perspective, George found much to appreciate in Pia … More The Enduring Influence of Pia Desideria (George Demetrion)
Over at Slate writer Ben Schreckinger argues that the seven-day week has outlived its usefulness: The pattern of living on a seven-day cycle—with one or two of those days set aside for rest—is a relative novelty. Only in the past few centuries, with Western colonization of most of the world, have the majority of human societies adopted it. … More The Week Is Dead, Long Live the Week!
Here… • The blogging team here at The Pietist Schoolman expanded, as my student Fletcher Warren responded to John Merriman’s The Dynamite Club and we introduced historian Jared Burkholder, our new regular guest blogger (stop back next Friday to read his first post). • Meanwhile, my colleagues at Bethel University continue to inspire me as … More That Was The Week That Was
While I work on another post for Tuesday, enjoy this post from last fall prompted by the collision of a couple of discussions in one of my signature courses at Bethel. In the last two weeks of my Modern Europe course, we’ve twice run headlong into the hardest question historians ask: Why? First, I had … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”
I missed Carlos Eire’s address last night, so today was my first taste of the 2012 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. I missed the 2010 version, but my sense is that this gathering is larger than the one in 2008 at Bluffton University. Some highlights from some of the papers I heard … More Thoughts from CFH 2012: Friday
Few books have been as significant in my professional life as Scholarship and Christian Faith: Enlarging the Conversation, edited (and about half-written) by the husband and wife team of Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, of Messiah College. I first encountered it in 2006, during a summer workshop at Bethel University led by the Jacobsens. … More Religion’s “Return” to Higher Education
Today I’ll continue my series on Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation, eds. John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller (University of Notre Dame Press) with a look at the book’s first part: a set of three chapters on what Miller (in his introduction) calls “that preeminently postmodern category and concern, … More Confessing History: Identity
A series of posts inspired by my recent trip to Europe, scouting a January 2013 travel course on the history of World War I. Today continues a series-within-the-series on how WWI was commemorated. Yesterday I showed the image of an Australian soldier’s gravestone, its epitaph asking “Have I died in vain?” Immediately above those words … More Commemorating World War I: Post-Christian Memory?
The Pietist Schoolman 