It was an eclectic week for me: from podcasting about IndyCar to reflecting on the Notre Dame fire. Of course, Holy Week also found me meditating a lot on Jesus: his entry into Jerusalem, how his death inspired poets and artists during the world wars, and how his followers and killers spent the first Holy … More That Was The Week That Was
This week I encouraged fellow scholars to “think in public,” reflected on why trust is so important to Christian higher education, and recorded a new podcast on the experience of student-athletes. Elsewhere… • I happened to be flying through Charlotte, North Carolina last week, and saw a big ad for the Billy Graham Library in … More That Was The Week That Was
If you’re interested in church-state relations or war commemoration (or, like me, both), check out today’s Atlantic article on American Humanist Association v. American Legion. Being argued before the U.S. Supreme Court next week, the case has to do with a World War I memorial standing in a traffic circle in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. There’s a … More Should American War Memorials Use Explicitly Christian Symbols?
On the last full day of our January travel course on World War I, we take our students to Munich’s modern art museum and ask them to write about whichever work best reflects what’s on their minds at the end of three weeks of studying total war and genocide. If I’d completed that assignment myself, … More Europe in Ruins: A Photo Essay
As I look back over the last year — not just here at Pietist Schoolman, but in my posts at The Anxious Bench, various talks and sermons, and other projects — three themes clearly stand out: The Pietist Option in Practice In some ways, it felt like publishing my book with Mark Pattie last October would conclude … More 2018: That Was The Year That Was
A wonderful new World War I documentary from Peter Jackson got me thinking about the magical qualities of history, and a Twitter spat over the history of evangelicalism made me realize that I’m not much of an expert in anything. Elsewhere… • Not everyone liked Jackson’s documentary. (H/T Karl Nelson and Tim Johnson) To that … More That Was The Week That Was
I love magic. That’s what Harry Potter murmurs at one point in The Goblet of Fire, the fourth story in J. K. Rowling’s series. The wizard-in-training walks into what had looked like a tiny, nondescript tent and finds that it is impossibly large and opulent. I love magic. I’m not sure how I can explain this, … More The Magic of History
In spare moments between grading, I passed along the story of Bethel’s soon-to-be first Digital Humanities graduate and took note of a proposed culture war compromise involving evangelical colleges. Then over at The Anxious Bench, I suggested that no historian writes about the past “as it actually happened” without imagining the past as they think … More That Was The Week That Was
The fourth season of The Pietist Schoolman Podcast wraps up today with Sam Mulberry and me talking about our favorite memorials, museums, meals, and masterpieces in the southern German city of Munich. In addition, we closed with some broader reflections on the spiritual purposes of travel. (If nothing else, skip ahead to 33:50 for our discussion of … More Thursday’s Podcast: Munich (and Why We Travel)
Sam and I are back from our Thanksgiving to talk through the next stop on our “World Wars in Western Europe” tour: Paris, France. After trying to decide whether or not Paris is our favorite city in the world — and why American college students rarely recognize it as anything like a contender for that … More Thursday’s Podcast: Paris
