Syllabus for “Computational History.”
Syllabus for “Computational History.”
Semi-annual shoutout to Caleb McDaniel’s Generic Syllabus Maker.
Draft syllabus for Global History of Christianity.
Incredible that a five hundred page reader in the history of Christianity can contain exactly two pages on Pentecostalism.
Robin Jensen’s new history of The Cross is an addition to my syllabus this semester. It’s my attempt to give the class more focus by adding a common theme across the centuries, while also extending the class into areas like art that aren’t my strength. It’s always an open question how well a new book will teach.
People, let me plead with you: your academic event does not need to be longer than one day. Unless you are an international scholarly society, in which case you can have a day and a half.
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” should have been my auto-reply when trying to schedule all the things this semester.
Grant submitted. That makes three this academic year so far.
I’ve only been using Notion for about a week, but my cautious, reserved opinion is that it is #$@&% incredible. It seems to be the perfect combination of wiki, plain text, lightweight database, web/Mac/iOS app, and privacy and sharing that I’ve wanted for a long time. I generally don’t want to trust anyone to keep my data available, but the export options seem legit, and even the subscription price can be viewed as a way to make sure the platform sticks around. We’ll see.
At ASCH in Chicago, I was on a panel with Shirley Mullen, whom I had never met. After a few minutes talking we learned that we were related through my great-grandfather, Stillman Mullen. I also learned that the association my great-grandfather was a part of in Aroostook County, Maine—the Reformed Baptist Alliance—had that name not because it was theologically Reformed, but because they were Arminians reforming their fellow Baptists’ Calvinism. Go figure. This fits with the family Arminianism passed down via my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father—all Baptist pastors.
True, fixing up my blog page was definitely not the most important thing I had to do today. But arguably tinkering with websites is in my job description.
Just as numismatics is a well-defined field, in future millennia archeologists will be able to date their finds precisely based on monitor cables.
This is hard to explain, but I had a keyboard/monitor plugged into a computer running Ubuntu, and now they are plugged into a computer running MacOS, and it appear that my muscle memory is associated with the keyboard and not the operating system.
By deleting Slack.
Fifty-six proposals for our workshops and special issue with the Journal of Social History. That’s … more than I expected.
Current status: recreational finding of studs.
“My next two book projects” is the new “my next book project.”
Happy belated birthday, Philip Schaff, born January 1, 1819, and founder of the American Society of Church History.
If you are at the AHA, check out this panel on “Lessons Learned from Three Digital Dissertations in History.” It features two George Mason doctoral students, Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe and Jeri Wieringa, as well as Zoe LeBlanc from Vanderbilt. As far as we know, Celeste’s dissertation is the first born-digital dissertation in history.
Tim Larsen’s religious biography of J. S. Mill for the Spiritual Lives series he edits at Oxford is deeply interesting and surprising. I’m a last-minute addition to a panel commenting on the book and series at the American Society of Church History annual meeting this week.
Pro tip for collaboration: Don’t update the axis legends on your visualizations from variable names to proper descriptions until you’ve signed off on the figure. You can tell at a glance if your collaborators have snuck an unfinished figure into their drafts.
American religious history is everywhere. But sometimes it shows up in the public library parking lot.
Helping family with their computers that do not have ad blockers installed has reacquainted me with the horrors of the modern web.
A collect for the Holy Innocents.
We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by the order of King Herod. Receive, we beseech thee, into the arms of thy mercy all innocent victims; and by thy great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish thy rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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