Travel

If you love travel and history but want something more than tourism, consider joining us on our next Pietist Schoolman Tour.

Historians often say that the past is like a foreign country. Even if you were to study an older version of your hometown, you would notice important differences in how people think, feel, and act. But that’s all the more true when we travel mentally across time and physically across space.

In a classroom, teachers and professors can try to help students imagine what it was like to live through the religious upheavals of the Reformation or the mechanized combat of World War II. But what if you did that in Martin Luther’s church or on Omaha Beach? What if you could listen to the words of eyewitnesses describe those events as you see, hear, touch, and even smell the scene for yourself?

Statue of Martin Luther in front of Berlin’s Marienkirche

We believe that historical travel can be not only enjoyable but educational, not just informative but transformative — intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

Learn more about our travel philosophy and our guides.

Next Tour

Christianity and German Culture (June 2023)

UPDATE (January 3, 2023): I’m afraid we had to cancel this tour. I’ll be leading a private tour in the summer of 2024, but we’re starting to plan public tours for 2025 and/or 2026. Click here to learn more.

After taking a couple years off because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re excited to return to Europe next summer. We’ll spend a week surveying the religious and political history of Germany. After starting with the Roman ruins of Trier and the medieval monuments of Aachen and Cologne, we’ll stop in the Reformation centers of “Luther Land” before concluding with two days in the modern city of Berlin, where we’ll encounter the memory of wars hot and cold.

Now a quiet town on the Mosel River, Trier’s history as a northern capital of the Roman Empire survives in the form of this gate, the Porta Nigra, plus an amphitheater, basilica, baths, and bridge

Most Recent Tour

2019: The World Wars in Western Europe

In June 2019 our inaugural tour took 22 people (ages 17 to 72) to Western Europe to explore the history of the two world wars. We started with three days in London and ended with three days in Paris and Munich, but the heart of the trip was a four-day guided tour of battlefields in Flanders, the Somme, and Normandy. Click here to read the full brochure.

Essex Farm Cemetery outside Ypres, Belgium, where a Canadian doctor named John McCrae wrote, “In Flanders Fields the poppies grow / Between the crosses, row on row”
Our 2019 group at the Canadian National WWI Memorial in Vimy, France
As the battle of the Somme began on July 1, 1916, German troops emerged from bunkers in this ravine
Visiting a former German artillery battery at Longues-sur-Mer, overlooking the beaches of Normandy