by Jim Bratt. Larry Eskridge, from Wheaton College, will be coming up to speak at our History department colloquium this Wednesday on the delicately phrased topic, “Jesus Knocked Me Off My Metaphysical Ass.” So I thought I’d give a brief summary of his recent book, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford University Press, …
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by Will Katerberg. If you’re interested in the history of the American West, you should get ahold of Earle Labor’s new biography, Jack London: An American Life, which I've been reading. I read novels and short stories by London (1876-1916) when I was a kid, but didn’t think much about them. They were adventure stories, …
Continue reading Book Note: Jack London’s Call of the Wild
by Dan Miller. Was American founded as a Christian nation? That question is the title of a 2011 book by John Fea, an American historian who teaches at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. Like most questions about the past, the answer turns out to be complicated. Fea was inspired (incited?) to write the book by encounters …
Continue reading Book Note: Was America Founded As a Christian Nation? by John Fea
by Bob Schoone-Jongen. I just finished reading A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States, a biography with lots of sin and no redemption, a tale sure to brighten a gloomy time of …
Continue reading Book Note: A Disposition to Be Rich by Geoffrey Ward
by Ron Wells. Some people reading this may recall Dr. Dale Brown, formerly of the English Department at Calvin. He was the guiding light of the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing. He is now at King College in Tennessee, where he directs The Buechner Institute, which, as its web page reads, is an institute …
Continue reading History and Memoir: Ordinary Life as History
by Will Katerberg Former Calvin College history professor George Marsden has a new book out this month. He taught in the Calvin history department in the 1970s and 1980s, before moving on to Duke and then Notre Dame, and has returned to Grand Rapids in the past few years, teaching courses at the college and …
Continue reading Book Note: George Marsden’s Twilight of the American Enlightenment
Historical Horizons 