The blog has been on hiatus for the summer. Most of the department faculty have been away on research trips or vacation, or buried deep in research. Summer is also a good time to catch up on reading, though; over the next few weeks, we'll be featuring brief recommendations on great books and articles that …
Continue reading Summer Reading: On the Great Lakes and Gibson Guitars
by Eric M. Washington. I, too, am a Son of the South, but of a different sort than Dylann Roof, the accused murderer of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. According to an op-ed published in The Chicago Tribune, one of Roof’s classmates stated that Roof “had that …
Continue reading I, Too, Am a Southerner
by Jonathan Hielkema. No. When you talk about plants, or an ecological system or forest, things are very easy if you decide that bad people ruined it. But that's not what humans have been doing. It's not bad people who are destroying forests. –Hayao Miyazaki Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke follows a young native Japanese (Emishi) …
Continue reading Princess Mononoke and History
by Bob Schoone-Jongen. This address was written for and presented at the Calvin College Teacher Commissioning Ceremony on May 22, 2015. You can watch the ceremony online; Bob Schoone-Jongen's address begins at about 40:30. At the risk of jumping the gun a bit, let me address you as “fellow teachers.” Consider this: Students tend to …
Continue reading To Teach Is To Learn
by Will Katerberg Prior to this class, history courses annoyed me because I always thought, ‘History is history, it happened and it’s over with, that’s that.’ This is true: history is in the past and you can’t change the past. But depending on how you approach history or what method you use to approach it, …
Continue reading What My Students (and I) Learned This Semester
Part 6 (conclusion) of the Integration of Faith & History in the Classroom series by Dan Miller. These are tough issues for students (and professors) to grapple with, especially if they have not previously been asked to examine carefully and think deeply. Hence, I encourage them to see their education as a process rather than a result. …
Continue reading Growing and Learning as a Christian Historian
Historical Horizons 