On Monday I shared a few things that I’m enjoying right now. I left one off the list in order to come back to it today: Yes, among the many other blessings of this sabbatical — time with my wife and kids, time with my parents, time to write and read — I get to visit the … More The Blue Ridge Parkway
Last week our family spent several days in Washington, DC and Pennsylvania, taking the kids to historic sites ranging from the Air & Space Museum to the Gettysburg battlefield. Indeed, one of my favorite things about this fall’s sabbatical is that it lets us continue the historical exploration that we did much of the summer back in Minnesota. … More 6 Things I’ve Learned about Teaching History to 6-Year Olds
Ten years ago yesterday, a man named Charles Carl Roberts IV shot ten students in a school near Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, then committed suicide. Five children died; five eventually recovered. Sadly, episodes like this have become almost familiar in American society, but this mass murder was unique. Not only did it take place at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in rural … More Amish Grace and the Anabaptist Way
It’s probably foolhardy to post on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway sensation Hamilton. Even if there’s anything new to say at this point, there’s no way to write about something so exhilarating and creative without coming off as dry and trite by comparison. Aaron Burr, the show’s narrator and somewhat sympathetic villain, would no doubt advise me to “Talk less, smile more.” But in … More At Long Last, My Post on Hamilton and History
Last week my Anxious Bench colleague John Turner drew our attention to America’s Public Bible, a new project by Lincoln Mullen. A leading digital historian who works (like John) at George Mason University, Lincoln describes APB in this way: America’s Public Bible uncovers the presence of biblical quotations in the nearly 11 million newspaper pages in the Library of Congress’s … More Following Up: Micah 6:8 in American Rhetoric
Time to show my hand and reveal of my favorite examples of historical moviemaking. Well, TV series-making, but then that’s just another form of the motion picture. After spending two Anxious Bench posts developing a set of four criteria for evaluating that kind of storytelling, today I applied them to two cable TV shows: the feminist time-traveling drama Outlander (Starz!) … More Soviets and Sassenachs: My Two Favorite Historical TV Series
Today at The Anxious Bench you’ll find part two of my series on how we might evaluate historical movies like Free State of Jones, which has inspired rave reviews from some historians and criticism from others. If you missed the first part, go back to read what I meant that historical movies and TV series must strive to be both … More What Makes for the Best Historical Movies? (part 2)
In the wake of the recent Southern Baptist debate about religious freedom for Muslims — and given the larger conversation about the meaning of religious freedom in an increasingly post-Christian society — I thought I’d use this week’s Anxious Bench post to revisit something I wrote about last year: how Baptists responded to the 1960s Supreme Court rulings against … More Religious Freedom: The Contested Core of Baptist Identity
I didn’t expect to write two posts on my first day on the job at The Anxious Bench. But while the first one was actually drafted last Thursday and Friday, Sunday’s mass shooting in Orlando left me feeling like I might have something more to say. So in this afternoon’s post, I attempted to reflect on what it means … More How Can Christians Love Their LGBT Neighbors? Start by Learning Their History
I haven’t written a lot about the Democratic side of the 2016 presidential election. (Frankly, if it weren’t that the Republicans had picked the nominee they apparently they have picked, I wouldn’t be writing much about them either.) But I don’t think I ought to let the week go by without saying something about what Hillary Clinton … More Seeing the Election through My Daughter’s Eyes
The Pietist Schoolman 