At some point in the history of this blog, I think I’ve had at least one post about every course that I teach — with one exception: I’ve said little about my upper-division course on the history of the Cold War, for the simple reason that I haven’t taught it since May 2011, and this … More Teaching the Cold War
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
Having been out of the country and out of my routine for almost all of January, I find myself with more flagged, starred, bookmarked, and otherwise highlighted links than I could possibly list in one Saturday links post. So instead I’ll be putting out three best-of-January posts, each clustered around one of the three stated … More That Was The Month That Was: Education
Preach it, Dr. Richard Gunderman! The nation’s 80,000 medical, 20,000 dental, and 180,000 nursing school students might think that lectures are dead, or at least dying. Health professions curricula increasingly feature small-group, interactive teaching, and successive waves of enthusiasm have arisen for laptops, PDAs, and tablet computers as the new paradigms of learning. Commentators frequently … More No, the Lecture Isn’t Dead
Reading this morning that American colleges and universities have accumulated over $200 billion in outstanding debt thanks to a “decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students” reminded me of this post from last November… I’ve mentioned once or twice before that my … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: College Architecture and Christian Simplicity
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
As a teacher, I grow restless easily, tinkering for the sake of tinkering. But even in those classes that I teach yearly or semesterly, there are certain fine-tuned exercises that I expect to repeat for years to come. One of those happened last week in my upper-division survey of modern European history, when after one … More Ordinary Men: Empathy and Judgment in the History of the Holocaust
Here • I’m not sure Pope Leo XIII thought all that much of evangelical Protestants in his day, but some of them in the present won’t let that get in the way of their admiring his most famous encyclical. (Meanwhile, Alan Jacobs was a bit less sanguine about finding “the common good.”) • Why Augustine … More That Was The Week That Was
Today in my Modern Europe class we’re wrapping up a week on the Holocaust by watching a German movie about Sophie Scholl and the other Munich University students who formed the anti-Nazi White Rose movement. It’s as hopeful (and it’s definitely bittersweet) a note on which I dare end so dark a chapter of history. … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Teaching the Holocaust
Before I get on a plane back to the Twin Cities, let me share some thoughts on the Saturday sessions from the 2012 meeting of the Conference on Faith and History, plus some more general observations: The early session featured three papers on “Christology in History: Three Perspectives from the Trenches.” All took off from … More Thoughts from CFH 2012: Saturday
The Pietist Schoolman 