This week: as I ended my six-year stint at The Anxious Bench, I rebooted this blog with posts on WWI commemoration in the German cities of Berlin and Wittenberg. Elsewhere: • Many conservative Christians celebrated two landmark rulings from the Supreme Court: though Friday’s, on abortion, may have already obscured the earlier one, on state funding … More That Was The Week That Was
Earlier this week I was invited to talk about Bethel’s history at a dinner celebrating the university’s 150th anniversary. For once I spoke without notes, but here’s the best I can do to reconstruct what I said: my attempt to make our history more personal for more people, rather than focusing on the stories of … More What Is Bethel? The Moments That Make Up Our History
This week I shared a free discussion guide for my Lindbergh biography and previewed the upcoming meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. Elsewhere: • My Anxious Bench colleague Nadya Williams (whose Jewish grandmother survived the German invasion of the Soviet Union) reflected on the Holocaust for the day set aside for its remembrance. (With … More That Was The Week That Was
This week I reconsidered the foreign policy of America’s first born-again president and suggested how Christians can realize just how big the Christian world is. Elsewhere: • Filed under the nothing-new-under-the-sun category… ongoing conservative attempts to ban critical race theory sounded to one historian of education a lot like the conservative agenda of the 1920s. (Or … More That Was The Week That Was
This week I considered the problem of evangelical catechesis, reflected on the length of biographies, and reported on the Anabaptist round of the Following Jesus conversation. Elsewhere: • The history of the American Civil War led Dan Williams to wonder “why, despite abundant historical and contemporary evidence that biblical interpretations vary widely, does the Bible continue … More That Was The Week That Was
This week I reported on my adult Sunday School class about evangelicalism and checked in on how Lutherans follow Jesus, while a couple of student journalists at Bethel wrote about me and my new book… which was reviewed in Front Porch Republic and the Portland (ME) Press Herald. Elsewhere: • If you’re not already reading … More That Was The Week That Was
With the COVID pandemic lingering longer than anyone had hoped, I haven’t had many chances to give talks about my newest book. So it was wonderful to speak about Charles Lindbergh in Bethel’s library last month. We had a good turnout, but in case you couldn’t be there — or able to Zoom in live … More The Education of Charles Lindbergh
Yesterday I was given the honor of delivering the keynote address at the college faculty retreat for Bethel University. The retreat committee asked me to speak on the theme of unity. Here’s a lightly edited version of my comments. I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the … More “Let the Tension Remain” (Eph. 4)
As I mentioned earlier this summer, historians at Bethel are now part of a larger Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Science, with each of those core majors — plus three of our interdisciplinary programs — culminating in a common capstone course that I’ll be teaching this fall: Applied Humanities Seminar. For the most part, I’m … More What Are “Applied Humanities”?
I’m not sure exactly what it will look like given Minnesota’s current COVID numbers, but three weeks from today begins the 2021-22 academic year at Bethel University. This fall I’m teaching two courses I’ve taught many times before — our first-year GES130 Christianity and Western Culture survey and my third-year course HIS354 Modern Europe — and … More Introducing… Applied Humanities Seminar
The Pietist Schoolman 