The first day of the fall semester of my senior undergraduate year, I ran into a friend of mine, a fellow history major, outside of the student union building at the research university we attended. We stopped and talked for a bit, updating each other on our lives and comparing our fall schedules. My friend had just been to the university bookstore, and he showed me a textbook he had just bought for a History of the Old South class that the history department was offering that fall. Intrigued, I sat in on the class and became immediately hooked. I added the class to my schedule and soon decided that I wanted to pursue southern history as a career. That decision set the course for my graduate studies. I spent years immersing myself in the upper southeast—including seemingly endless hours immersing myself in the pertinent scholarly literature, as well as traveling to special collections and sitting in manuscript and microfilm rooms poring through primary sources. And I learned how to practice a discipline I really did not understand as an undergraduate. [Read more…] about Scholar’s Call: The Joy of Becoming a Generalist
history
Book Review: Mere Believers
Mere Believers: How Eight Faithful Lives Changed the Course of History, Mark Baer. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013.
Summary: Can individuals seeking to live faithfully to their calling change history? These profiles of eight British believers demonstrate that “mere believers†can indeed have a transformative influence in matters both of the heart and of the intellect.
Book Review: The First Thanksgiving
McKenzie, Robert Tracy. The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History. Downers Grove, IL:Â IVPÂ Academic, 2013.
Review by Joshua Shiver
“Ours is a present-tense society,†historian Robert Tracy McKenzie notes, “We live in a time and place in which thinking deeply about the past is a countercultural and even a radical act.†Twenty-four hour news channels, instant status updates, and communication with the click of a mouse or tap of a finger have made ours a world of the here-and-now. This myopic focus on the present has blinded us to the importance of our past—even as modern Americans grope for answers to societal woes in a post 9/11 world. As a graduate student, the question I am most often asked now is what I intend to do with a degree in history. I’ve realized that behind this less-than-subtle jab at my life choices, friends and acquaintances are really asking me “What’s the point?†[Read more…] about Book Review: The First Thanksgiving
Faithful Is Successful: Interview with Howard Louthan
ESN continues its series of interviews with authors of Faithful Is Successful, with Esther Harris interviewing Howard Louthan. You can read Esther’s previous post on Howard’s chapter in Faithful Is Successful here. In fall 2015 Howard Louthan and his wife Andrea Sterk will be assuming new positions at the University of Minnesota. They both previously taught history at the University of Florida. Howard specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Renaissance and Reformation Europe with a particular focus on religion. His most recent books include Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009) and an edited collection of essays Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012). Howard and Andrea have a family of three children.Â
1. Esther: It was a pleasure to sense your clear vocational calling to history in your reflection. You say this ‘great love’ began as an undergraduate. Would you share with us if and how this scholarly love was fostered by your Christian faith back then?
Howard:Â I grew up in a very supportive Christian family in terms of learning. My parents worked hard to instill in us a real love for learning and perhaps most importantly a curiosity for the world around us. They were careful not to steer us in any one particular direction. [Read more…] about Faithful Is Successful: Interview with Howard Louthan
ESN Local: Malice Toward None; Charity for All
Fellow-Countrymen . . . With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. – Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (March, 4, 1865).
On Sunday, November 30, John Fea (Chair, Dept of History, Messiah College) presented on . . .
- Abraham Lincoln’s use of the Sermon on the Mount in his Second Inaugural Address (March, 4, 1865).
- his engaging (and provocatively titled/covered) book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011). Teaser quotes:
- “First, the past can inspire us. Second, the familiarity of the past helps us to see our common humanity with others who have lived before us. Third, the past gives us a better understanding of our civic identity.”
- “One of my goals in writing Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? is to get Christians to see the danger of cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a political or cultural agenda in the present.”
- “The past is the past—a record of events that occurred in bygone eras. But history is a discipline—the art of reconstructing the past.”
- “The writings of these constitutional skeptics present an interesting dilemma for those today who want to argue that the Constitution was a Christian document. In the eighteenth century it was those who opposed the Constitution who made the strongest arguments in favor of the United States being a Christian nation.”
- “When ministers, politicians, and writers during these years described the United States as a “Christian nation,†they were usually referring to the beliefs and character of the majority of its citizens.”
- “If there was one universal idea that all the founders believed about the relationship between religion and the new nation, it was that religion was necessary in order to sustain an ordered and virtuous republic.” — For more teasers visit Most Highlighted Passages in the Kindle Edition of “Was American Founded as a Christian Nation?” (5/24/2013).
[Read more…] about ESN Local: Malice Toward None; Charity for All