How’s this for a college recruitment slogan? “Bethel University: you might not come back, but you will not be the same” No? What if we had Sir Ian McKellen intone it, as in the first part of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, when Martin Freeman’s Bilbo is being encouraged by McKellen’s wizard Gandalf to go … More The Christian Liberal Arts as Tolkienesque Quest
Aside from posts on John Le Carré and the history of college closures, it was a mostly quiet week here at The Pietist Schoolman. But other writers more than picked up my slack: • Two more essays on Le Carré: Emma Hogan analyzed the spy novelist’s writing style; Dwight Garner profiled him for the New … More That Was The Week That Was
With two exams to grade at work, it seems like a good moment to rerun some favorite posts from the first three months of 2013. We’ll start by stretching the “Best of The Pietist Schoolman” definition a bit and collate four posts I wrote for our department blog, at different points along the way in … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Teaching WWI in Europe
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel and elsewhere around the world. I don’t think it’s widely known in the United States — partly because it falls on the 27th day in the Jewish month of Nissan, and so moves year by year within the Gregorian calendar — but even if this is … More Holocaust Remembrance Day
Pilate asked them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but the emperor.” Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus; and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is … More The Cross: A Good Friday Meditation on World War and Holocaust
Here… • Historians shouldn’t ask half-baked, existential questions about theology if they don’t want actual theologians to answer them, as I learned in pondering the role of doctrine in Pietism. (Do check the comments on that post: two come from colleagues who are collaborating on a new book about Pietism.) • Part three of my … More That Was The Week That Was
Yesterday I explained that, inspired by the realization that there simply aren’t many movies about the American Revolutionary War — let alone good movies, I spent some time over the weekend going through the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and the Rotten Tomatoes (RT) index of critics to see which modern wars have produced the best … More Which Modern War Has Yielded the Best Movies? (part 2)
Here… • I’m normally a big proponent of empathy as a historical virtue. But I can’t say that I grieved all that much to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Josef Stalin suffering the stroke that killed him. I did, however, enjoy teaching my students a song about said demise… • What is the poor Downton … More That Was The Week That Was
Good to be back home after three weeks in Europe teaching about World War I… I’ll be easing back into blogging this week, starting with a post tomorrow soliciting readers’ thoughts about the questions I’ll be asking Feb. 8-10 when I teach the Winter Seminar at Bethlehem Covenant Church in Minneapolis. Then I’ll stretch out … More Back from Europe!
1/21/13 – Gruss Gott from Munich, where we’re into the last leg of our history of WWI travel course. Over on our department blog I just posted a new update covering our five days in Paris — including a photo of me leading a simulation of the Versailles Peace Conference… in the Hall of Mirrors … More How Ya Going to Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm…
The Pietist Schoolman 