Here… • When the week started, did I think that I’d writing about the spiritual implications of birdwatching? No. By Thursday afternoon had I written the phrase “orni-theological musing“? Yes. Blogging is weird. • Jared Burkholder introduced us to the Moravian branch of the Pietist family tree. I’m hoping for a sequel in which he … More That Was The Week That Was
If you’re not a member of the American Historical Association (AHA), you might not have heard that our guild is in the middle of a fracas heated enough to have generated its own hashtag: #AHAgate. Or perhaps you have, since it attracted the attention of the New York Times on Monday. Quick version: nine days … More The Underquestioned Assumption at the Heart of #AHAgate
I’ll be going back on break tomorrow, while we spend a week with my parents in Virginia. But first, let me briefly return to a series I started earlier this month: blogging through some of the excellent questions I was asked via Skype by Mr. Ferda’s 8th grade history class in Kalispell, Montana. The first … More Good Questions: How Do You Become a Historian?
Among my favorite posts from this past February was this second entry in my — not yet complete — series on “The Vocation of a Christian Historian,” asking whether historians ought to think of what they do as a profession, vocation, or both. As I mentioned last week, as part of Bethel’s faculty promotion process … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Profession vs. Calling
Perhaps no book has done more to make me think anew about my vocation as a Christian historian than Confessing History (Univ. of Notre Dame Press). So as I sought points of entry for discussing that topic in my promotion essay, I took some inspiration from a piece in the January/February 2012 issue of Books … More The Vocation of a Christian Historian: Seeking and Telling Truth
How do historians define what it is that they do? Is it a profession? A vocation? Both? As I mentioned last week, as part of Bethel’s faculty promotion process I recently wrote a lengthy essay on the meaning of vocation for a Christian historian like myself. In my first post stemming from that essay, I … More The Vocation of a Christian Historian: Profession vs. Calling
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
The Pietist Schoolman 