At some point in my life, it was bound to happen: I would be asked to teach Sunday School. And not the adult kind, which I’ve done several times and isn’t all that different from teaching college students — except that the audience is much more likely to have been awake more than ten minutes … More 4 Things I’ve Learned Teaching 4th Grade Sunday School
Here • One last burst of rating college ratings focused on the use of “comparison groups” by colleges and universities. • In their own return to publishing, Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen examined another return: that of religion to higher education. • It wasn’t a long post, but struggling to pick just nine favorite Bob Dylan … More That Was The Week That Was
This semester I’m directing an independent study on the theory and practice of public history by a student who’s interested in pursuing graduate study in that increasingly popular field. In our weekly conversation on Wednesday, we talked about his initial impressions of how public historians have tried to define what it is that they do. … More Crowdsourcing and the Practice of History
Here • My colleague Christian Collins Winn shared his year-opening chapel talk at Bethel, in which he suggested how Pietism might provide a model for civil discourse. (And be sure to check out Brian Gumm’s response to that post at his blog, Restorative Theology. It was certainly gratifying to read that he thinks Christian and … More That Was The Week That Was
Here • My post on the 150th anniversary of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 became my first to be featured by WordPress on its “Freshly Pressed” page! • Academic historians just need to stop whining about “popular” historians. Now. • The second part of my series on the commemoration of World War I in Minnesota … More That Was The Week That Was
In January 1998 Penn State University head football coach Joe Paterno and his wife Sue gave the school $3.5 million to endow faculty positions, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate scholarships, mostly in the College of Liberal Arts. Gushed Penn State president Graham Spanier, “I’m the luckiest University president in the United States.” When retired historian Michael … More A Grand Experiment: Why Sports Belong in Higher Education
Here • The 70th anniversary of a dark day in French history, when French police helped their German occupiers to round up 13,000 Jewish women, men, and children, cram them into a bicycling arena without sanitation, and eventually send them to their deaths in Auschwitz. • The summer’s half over, but there’s still time for … More That Was The Week That Was
This morning I spent some time booking London hotel rooms for next January, when I’ll take a group of Bethel students to Europe for a three-week course on the history of World War I. Having that kind of planning in mind, I was glad for the recent reminder, from literary scholar Ilan Stevens and editor … More Reclaiming Travel
This fall a joint venture from Harvard and MIT, called edX, will make available free online courses from two of the world’s elite research universities. As the New York Times reported, the Harvard-MIT collaboration follows in the wake of a similar partnership involving Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan (“Coursera“). … More Education as “Infotainment”: or, The One Where I Become Part of the Problem
I’m still eighteen months away from teaching my new World War II history course for the first time, but I’ve been thinking about it this week after reading an interview with master spy novelist Alan Furst (whose new book, Mission to Paris, will surely appear on my summer reading list when it comes out next week). … More Moral Histories of World War II
The Pietist Schoolman 