In 2017, I changed the topic of my digital methods class to Reconstruction. Twenty days before that class meets this year, a mob organized on social media flying the Confederate battle flag stormed the Capitol while a Southern senator proposed an Electoral Commission.
My internal monologue upon assigning the Gospel of Mark:
“Hmm. Should I scan this reading for the students?”
“The Gospel of Mark might be the most widely distributed text in the history of humanity. I think they can find themselves a copy.”
“Saves time, and also educational.”
I’m teaching The Global History of Christianity this semester. It is far and away my favorite course to teach, even though I feel humbled—and almost crushed—by the weight of the subject.
The most recent issue of my newsletter points you to two songs about death and breath. Johnny Cash and Jimmie Rodgers.
I put a photos widget on my phone, and everyday it turns up a half dozen picture like this one.
My daughter made a genuine game, with a start screen and levels, all in Google Slides. You move a little spaceship around a city called Galactic X. It’s pretty cool. Now, the rest of her schooling …
📰 Newsletter: Presbyterians—tabulated, visualized, and interpreted.
Currently reading: Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz. 📚
A bitter cup.
Today’s task: remembering what in the world I was doing the last time I touched this project.
Currently reading: Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. 📚
Consider the lilies of the field.
9 y.o.: “Daddy, can I ask you a question.”
Me: “Yes.”
9 y.o.: “Does anyone actually read your book?”
“Everybody’s Bible Box”
“To cast a free ballot ・A root of democracy”
The 4 y.o. wrote this letter (without help!) to his grandparents, who could not come visit this summer. It is beautiful and heartbreaking.
“MA AND PA i LOVE YOU TO[O] BUT YOU [ARE] AT YOUR HAWS MY [A]ND DAD[D]Y LOVE”
Currently reading: Religion and Profit: Moravians In Early America by Kate Carté. 📚
Well, that’s one take on the Oxford Movement.
I’m not 100% sure what it means to say “Democracy is the law of nature pervading the law of the land,” but it sounds good.
Is it possible to be a low-level academic administrator without it killing your prose style? Asking for myself.
In the most recent issue of Working on It, I talk through how I revised a visualization to be as honest about what it represents as possible. Also, brief book notes on two books on evangelical masculinity and femininity.
This historian has been cited in an article titled “Dynamic courtship signals and mate preferences in Sepia plangon.” (If you, like me, were wondering, that is a kind of a cuttlefish.) Pretty good for an outspoken disciplinary chauvinist.
My daughter: “I’ve never understood why there is so much shouting at camps.”
Emphasis on my daughter.
I can tell I’m a low-level chump because I try to write meaningful email subject lines. If you are dean- or president-level important, all your emails begin, “A message from …”
Currently reading: The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power Of Evangelical Women Celebrities by Bowler, Kate. 📚
The book has six appendices, which is fantastic. The appendix is sadly underused in history books. An appendix (or six) lets you keep the body of the prose tight and clean, while letting you indulge in tangents, basic research that is worthwhile but can’t fit a narrative or argument, discussions of method, or things that are just plain interesting.