The Best History Books of 2014?

It’s time for our annual holiday tradition: picking through some prominent lists of the best books of the past year to suggest potential gifts for the history buff in your life. This year we’ll cull suggestions from the New York Times (NYT), the Guardian (G), the Washington Post (WP), and Christianity Today (CT). Jessie Childs, God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England “…conjures … More The Best History Books of 2014?

That Was The Week That Was

Here… We heard from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christena Cleveland, Makoto Fujimura, and Allan Boesak. I’ll write more next week. …There and Everywhere • I wasn’t the only white evangelical writer suggesting that what happened to Michael Brown (and Eric Garner) should prompt us to listen more closely to people of color. Fred Sanders of Biola University called the sequence … More That Was The Week That Was

On Advertising, Chocolate, and the First World War

One of the cultural residues of Britain being a post-Christian society is that companies try to outdo each other in celebrating the Incarnation by creating memorable “Christmas adverts.” The 2014 versions are coming out, and one has already garnered enormous attention — positive and negative: Yes, the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s not only produced a three-minute … More On Advertising, Chocolate, and the First World War

Ottawa: The War Memorial as a Scene of Violence

As I prepare to take another group of Bethel University students to Europe to learn about World War I, I’m particularly eager to show them how the war has been commemorated — in cities like London, Paris, and Munich, but also on the former Western Front itself. Two of the most striking memorials from the second … More Ottawa: The War Memorial as a Scene of Violence