2011 Messiah College Faith and History Lecture

If you are in the Grantham, PA area tomorrow (November 1, 2011) at 4:15pm please consider coming to the 2011 Messiah College History Department Annual Faith & History Lecture. 

This year's lecturer is Dr. James LaGrand. He will be delivering an address entitled:

“Considerations of a (somewhat) Calvinist historian”

The lecture will be held in Boyer Hall 336.  Refreshments will follow in the Howe Atrium in Boyer Hall. We hope to see you there.

Dochuk Wins the Dunning Prize

In case you have not heard, Darren Dochuk of Purdue University, the author of From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, is the 2011 winner of the American Historical Association's Dunning Prize for the best book in American history.

Congratulations!!  See a more thorough report from Paul Harvey at Religion in American History.

In Praise of "A Midwife's Tale"--The Documentary

Today I showed "A Midwife's Tale" in my United States History before 1865 course.  As many of you know, this documentary is based on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Midwife's Tale; The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812.

This film works on multiple levels.  First, it introduces general education students to the task of the historian.  Ulrich's voice-overs and the scenes of her bringing order to the diary of Martha Ballard provide a wonderful window into the historian's vocation.

Second, Ballard's story introduces my students to the world of a rural woman living in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America.  It teaches them that there was more to the 1790s than Federalists and Republicans battling over national banks, reports on public credit, manufacturing, and the French Revolution.

Third, "A Midwife's Tale" is excellent at portraying the past as a so-called "foreign country."  Ulrich explains a host of early American customs that remind us that our world is quite different from the world of Martha Ballard.

Finally, I like the way the film indirectly teaches my students about calling and vocation.  Martha is an admirable figure to many of my students because of her steadfast commitment to her vocation as a midwife.  The film has proven to be very popular among nursing majors (both male and female) and those pursuing the health professions, but it also illustrates what a "calling" might look like in any vocational pursuit.

If you are not already using this film in your classes, I encourage you to consider it.

How to Study

Here is an interesting article on some new research related to how students learn.  I encourage you to read the entire piece. The conclusion is pasted below:

...The implications for how we teach and learn should be clear. Wanting to remember, or telling people to remember, isn’t effective. If you want to remember something you need to think about it deeply. This means you need to think about what you are trying to remember means, both in relationship to other material you are trying to learn, and to yourself. Other research in memory has shown the importance of schema – memory patterns and structures – for recall. As teachers, we try and organise our course material for the convenience of students, to best help them understand it. Unfortunately, this organisation – the schema – for the material then becomes part of the assessment and something which students try to remember. What this research suggests is that, merely in terms of remembering, it would be more effective for students to come up with their own organisation for course material.

If you are a student the implication of this study and those like it is clear : don’t stress yourself with revision where you read and re-read textbooks and course notes. You’ll remember better (and understand much better) if you try and re-organise the material you’ve been given in your own way.

If you are a teacher, like me, then this research raises some disturbing questions. At a University the main form of teaching we do is the lecture, which puts the student in a passive role and, essentially, asks them to “remember this” – an instruction we know to be ineffective. Instead, we should be thinking hard, always, about how to create teaching experiences in which students are more active, and about creating courses in which students are permitted and encouraged to come up with their own organisation of material, rather than just forced to regurgiate ours.

Grafton and Grossman: Plan C

Some of you may remember Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman's column "No More Plan B in which they challenged graduate programs in history to think about how they might prepare students for careers outside of the academy.  We blogged about it here and here.

Grafton (the sitting president of the American Historical Association) and Grossman (the executive director of the AHA) are at it again in the October 2011 issue of Perspectives on History.  In Plan C, they get more specific about what training history Ph.Ds for non-academic jobs might look like.  Here is a small taste:

There are programs—especially small ones—that have been particularly creative, or taken advantage of unique local assets. James Axtell tells us that when he arrived at William and Mary in the late 1970s, "we had MA (and occasionally PhD) apprenticeships (along with coursework) in archival management (through the library), historical archaeology (with Colonial Williamsburg), historical editing, and museum management (with CW). The first and last have disappeared for budgetary reasons, but we've added humanities computing with CW for one person a year. The strongest and most popular program is editing at the Institute for Early American History and Culture."

A more ambitious way to open possibilities is to form university-wide alliances. Deans of graduate schools and disciplinary divisions are collecting statistics, for instance, far more systematically than they once did, tracking students' progress through their programs and their success in finding jobs. Institutions need to know what their graduates are doing—whether to assess the quality of education they have delivered, or to keep track of potential donors. Their comprehensive collection and assessment of data could be of tremendous assistance not only to historians, but also to other fields in the humanities and social sciences.

By working with one another and with their deans, departments could more easily find the resources to provide kinds of instruction that we aren't offering at present: courses in digital technologies and their uses, for example, could be mounted more economically for all students in the humanities than for historians alone. One of us took a course in graduate school—while working on the dissertation as suggested in the "Plan B" outline—that offered humanists an opportunity to learn basic quantitative literacy from an economic historian. Digital literacy would be the contemporary counterpart. It would also make sense for universities, rather than departments that necessarily work from a limited perspective and knowledge base, to mount workshops on career possibilities, to bring informants like some of our correspondents to campus to talk about their lives and careers, and to offer systematic help for nonacademic placement (a service that they offer their undergraduate and masters alumni as a matter of course). The AHA hopes to become a clearinghouse for such resources.

Gerson: Bachmann's Campaign is "Callous" and "Discreditable"

Michael Gerson, the George W. Bush speechwriter, evangelical Christian, and Washington Post columnist has little good to say about Michelle Bachmann's campaign for the presidency.  Here is a taste of his recent post at "Post Partisan":

Bachmann’s candidacy represents a digression in the quality and seriousness of evangelical political engagement. It is difficult to imagine Mike Huckabee boasting of his indifference to the health and welfare of children, whatever their background. Even Pat Robertson, running for president in 1988, would have balked at such callousness. Both men would have been too conscious of the warnings found in Matthew 25, where Christianity’s founder defines the proper Christian attitude toward the hungry, the sick, the prisoner and the stranger. “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these,” he said, “you did not do for me.”

Bachmann holds her faith deeply and understands its political implications poorly. Her campaign is increasingly discrediting to causes — including the pro-life cause — she seeks to serve. 

Read the entire post here.

Happy Halloween

AHA Today has some great links for historians.

Inside Higher Ed asks: What interview questions terrify you?

Still looking for a creative costume?  The National Museum of American History has some suggestions.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things online that caught my attention this week:

The New York Times on Institutional Review Boards and oral history.

Get ready to nominate The Way of Improvement Leads Home for a Cliopatria Award. 

Edge of the American West is back.

Richard Beeman reviews Richard Brookhiser's James Madison.

Mark Silk analyzes Robert Jeffress.

The Mighty Macs 

The latest on history education funding.

David Holahan reviews David O. Stewart, American Emperor: Aaron Burr's Challenge to Jefferson's America.

The Smithsonian is documenting Occupy Wall Street.

Terry Teachout reviews Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism.

Alan Wolfe reviews Corey Rubin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg reflects on her Violent Empire; The Birth of National Identity.

Women and intellectual history.

Brenda Wineapple reviews Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. Marjorie Kehe reviews it here. Kevin Boyle reviews it here.  Brook Wilensky-Lanford reviews it here.

Most Popular Posts of the Last Week

Here are the ten most visited posts this week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

1. The Evangelical Rejection of Reason
2. Bumper Sticker of the Day
3. The Top Ten Most Religious Cities in America
4. Religion in Jamestown
5. What's Going on at the Stony Brook School?
6. How to Cite Facebook and Twitter?
7. Will Loek Van Mil Be the First Seven Footer to Take the Mound in MLB History?
8.  God and the Declaration of Independence
9.  Are Students Ignorant of the Civil Rights Movement?
10. Baylor University Lands Jean Bethke-Elshtain

Also receiving votes:
Dispatches from Graduate School--Part 39
Why We Need Anne Hutchinson

Only 42% of Americans Know Romney is a Mormon

From the Religious News Service:

(RNS) Less than half of Americans know that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is a Mormon, despite recent media attention focused on his faith, a new survey shows.
 
Just four in 10 Americans -- 42 percent -- identified the former Massachusetts governor as a Mormon, according to the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute. That figure remains unchanged from July 2011, despite a flurry of media attention after an evangelical supporter of another GOP candidate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, called Romney's religion a "cult."
 
The only group that showed an increased knowledge about Romney's religion was white evangelicals, whose knowledge of Romney's faith rose from 44 percent in July to 53 percent in mid-October.

"The increase in knowledge of Romney's Mormon faith among evangelicals is potentially problematic for Romney, since we know from our research that six in 10 evangelicals do not see the Mormon faith to be a Christian religion," said Daniel Cox, PRRI's research director.

"As more evangelical voters identify Romney as a Mormon, the question will be whether he can bridge the religious gap with shared political values."

Researchers found that Perry trails both Romney and rival Herman Cain among white evangelicals on measures of political affinity, but is relatively even withCain on measures of religious affinity. Just 8 percent of evangelical voters said Romney's beliefs are closest to their own.

The poll is based on a random sample of 1,019 adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

People Are Awesome

HT: Andrew Sullivan

A Reverse David Barton?

This is what Jon Rowe at American Creation calls this atheist billboard.  Here is the story at the Huffington Post:

A billboard in Costa Mesa, Calif., is getting some attention, but it's certainly not the kind its sponsors were hoping for.

The sign, paid for by atheist group Backyard Skeptics, includes a quote about Christianity attributed to Thomas Jefferson. But further research reveals there's no solid evidence that Jefferson ever uttered or wrote the words, the Orange County Register first reported.

The billboard includes a picture of Jefferson with the quote: "I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature. It is founded on fables and mythology."

Experts at the Jefferson Library Collection at Monticello are constantly asked about the quote, the Orange County Register reports. Some say the former president wrote the words in a letter to a Dr. Wood, but officials cannot find trace of any
correspondence to a person by that name.

Bruce Gleason, a member of the group, told the Orange County Register that he should have done a bit more research before putting the words on the sign. The billboard was unveiled on Wednesday, the newspaper reports. Gleason explained that purpose of this sign and others around the city was to "expunge the myth that this is a Christian nation," as well as to "share the idea that you can be good and do good without a religion or god."

Charles Taylor on Secularism

He discusses historic attempts to define America as a "Christian nation."  I appreciate his sense of change over time on this issue.  Not bad for a philosopher.



HT: Jon Rowe at American Creation

Jack Chick and Halloween

If you are an evangelical of a certain age, you may be familiar with some of the evangelistic tracts authored by Jack Chick.  I vividly remember one published in the late 1970s called "The Sissy." It  featured a truck driver who calls Jesus a "sissy" after he sees a "Jesus Saves" sticker on the back of another rig parked at a truck stop.  He later finds out that the driver of the truck is a giant, musclebound, evangelical Christian who looks as if he is about seven feet tall.  The evangelical giant invites the truck driver and his friend to eat with him.  He shares the gospel with the truck driver and converts him to Christianity.

I was reminded of "The Sissy" while reading Joe Carter's post about Chick's Halloween tracts.  Here is a taste:

While you may not recognize the name, if you’ve ever used the restroom of a truck stop then you’ve probably seen his work (they are always found there—always). Chick produces tracts and comics that look like work that R. Crumb would have produced had he attended Bob Jones University. For over twenty years the tracts have been used to spread such Christian messages as Catholics are going to hell and that the Holocaust was a Jesuit-led inquisition against the Jews.

To me, though, Chick is not just another anti-Catholic bigot. When I was a kid Jack Chick was the man who was responsible for more nightmares than the Twilight Zone and Kolchak: The Nightstalkerall around me. combined. Chick not only scared the hell out of me, he made me afraid that hell was

While his comic books are less well known than his tracts, they were a primary source of children’s literature around my fundamentalist church. In a typical display of twisted ’70s fundie logic, our congregation believed that comics about Satan and the occult were more wholesome than reading about Spiderman or Archie and Jughead.

Read the rest here.

Trick or Treat Blogging

You may have noticed that I just published seven posts in the last two hours.  This is because tonight is "Trick or Treat Night" in my neighborhood.  I have been sitting near the front door of my house for the last two hours handing out candy to the trick or treaters.  (And eating my faith share of the candy).  Since I don't like to be interrupted when I read, I thought that blogging would be a good way to pass the time.  I hope you benefited in some small way from my efforts!

It's Official: Springsteen Exhibit Will Be At the National Constitution Center in February

Here is the press release:

Philadelphia, PA (October 27, 2011) – Today – on the anniversary of the date Bruce Springsteen appeared on the covers of both TIME and Newsweek in 1975 – the National
Constitution Center announced that it will be the only venue to host the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s must-see exhibition, From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen. The first major exhibition about the American songwriter will run at the Center from February 17 to September 3, 2012.

“It is fitting that the Center – the only museum dedicated to America’s constitutional freedoms –is the first and only venue in the nation to host this exhibition from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum,” said National Constitution Center President and CEO David Eisner. “We are certain that our visitors, from the most devoted Springsteen fans to those experiencing his music for the first time, will be inspired by his commitment to illuminating the struggles and triumphs of ‘We the People.’”

“I worked very closely with Bruce and his organization to put this exhibit together,” said Jim
Henke, vice president of exhibitions and chief curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
Museum. “It’s a comprehensive look at Bruce’s entire career and contains numerous items that
have never been seen by the public. The exhibit was a huge hit when it was at the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame, and I am very happy that even more people will be able to see it now that it’s
at the National Constitution Center.”

From Asbury Park to the Promised Land takes a comprehensive look at Springsteen’s career
and catalog, from such early bands as Child, the Castiles and Steel Mill through his work with
the E Street Band and as a solo artist. Throughout the 5,000-square-foot exhibition, visitors will
have the rare opportunity to view more than 150 items, including:
 
· Family photos of Springsteen’s childhood in Asbury Park, N.J.
· Scrapbooks containing newspaper clippings, photos and handbills from Springsteen’s
early music endeavors
· Handwritten lyrics from all phases of Springsteen’s career
· Saxophone used by the late Clarence Clemons to play the solo in “Jungleland” from
Born to Run
· Springsteen’s 1960 Chevrolet Corvette
· Springsteen’s Fender Esquire from the cover of Born to Run
· The outfit Springsteen wore on the cover of Born in the U.S.A.
· Springsteen’s 1993 Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Streets of Philadelphia”

The exhibition also features several listening stations where visitors can hear never-beforereleased
songs by the Castiles; Springsteen’s successful 1972 audition for Columbia Records;
and interviews with Springsteen on topics such as his songwriting process, his first recording
session, and some of his best known albums. Video footage throughout the exhibition includes
archival performances, an edited version of Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run, and
clips of Springsteen’s appearance on MTV Unplugged in 1992.

To complement the exhibition, the Center’s public programming staff is developing a variety of
interactive programs and activities for students, teachers and families about the importance of
free expression. The Center also is planning a series of special events celebrating the music of
Bruce Springsteen.

Admission to From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen
is $24.50 for adults, $23 for seniors and students and $12 for children ages 4-12. Group rates
also are available. Admission to the Center’s main exhibition, The Story of We the People,
including the award-winning theater production Freedom Rising, is included. For ticket
information, call 215.409.6700 or visit www.constitutioncenter.org.

Jonathan Rees Asks: "How Do You Skim an E-Book?"

Great question!

Rees wanted to take a quick look at John Higham's Strangers in the Land to improve a chapter on immigration in his current book manuscript.  The book was checked out of the library, but the librarian offered him an e-book.  Rees explains his dilemma.

I’ve been spending a lot of time this semester re-reading classics on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American history in order to improve the book manuscript that I have to submit in December. Yesterday, I decided it was time to pick up John Higham’s Strangers in the Land again, since my editor had said that my immigration chapter needs improvement. The copy in our library was checked out. Those at my university do, however, have access to an electronic version of the manuscript!

That’s wasn’t good enough for me because I want to browse it. My manuscript is already done. All I need to do is find the parts that Higham wrote that will be most relevant to me quickly and move on since I’ve got a lot of books to read before the deadline (and three courses to teach when not writing).

Higham’s chapter titles aren’t specific enough for me to find the relevant parts, and I don’t have any particular search terms in mind since I’m interested in juicy details I can add to the narrative rather than any particular subject. In an e-book, it would take me far too long to page through everything. I’m not sure the entire page would even fit on my computer screen.

The failure to skim a book could destroy graduate student life as we know it. 

Larry Cebula's Giude to Attending an Academic Conference

Larry Cebula is an award-winning blogger who expounds on public history and other dimensions of academic life at Northwest History.  Last week he posted his "Notes Toward a Guidebook For Attending Scholarly Conferences."  This list is loaded with great ideas, helpful advice, and even some humor.  Here is just a brief taste:

• Avoid round tables, plenaries, “wither our field” sessions, and other sessions where the presenters are allowed to talk about themselves, because they will talk about nothing else. Some academics see the world as a movie in which they are both the star and narrator. Ugh. 
• On a related note, don't try to approach or make eye contact with the senior scholars in your discipline--the silver backs. Though they might be nice enough if you met them anywhere else, at the disciplinary conference they must stay focused on their elaborate rituals--chest-thumping, mating displays, and grooming one another's luxurious academic coats.
• Also to be avoided are panels where all of the presenters are linked by a single institution or all of the presenters are graduate students.
• When in doubt, sit in back near the door so you can skip out to a different session.

Kevin Schultz Reflects on Uncoverage

In my "Teaching History" course at Messiah College we just finished a discussion of "uncoverage," Lendol Calder's vision for the U.S. survey course.  Readers of this blog know that I have been enamored with Calder's approach for some time, although I have not yet had the opportunity to give it a try.  (See my discussion of Calder's work here and here ). 

Kevin Schultz, the co-author of the very helpful blog "Teaching United States History," discusses the strengths and weaknesses of "uncoverage" as it applies to his classes at the University of Illinois-Chicago.  Here is a taste:

There is much merit this approach, and to his credit Calder (and my department's advocates for him) has got me re-thinking the way I set up my discussion sections and even some of the readings I assign in my 100-level survey. Indeed, after the brownbag I am even more impressed with the Major Problem series, which consciously sees history as a series of arguments with results based on documents.

On the other hand, there are several problems with Calder's approach, at least as it appears in the article. First, he's teaching a ten-week semester, for 30 students, on 1945 to the present. With such limitations, his approach is probably wonderful. But in my experience, a class of that description is not "the survey" but an upper-division class. In my 100-level classes, I get 120 students in a lecture hall with bolted down seats and two TAs who lead Friday discussion sections. We're talking apples and oranges here. When I teach upper-division classes, I'm most certainly taking another look at the article.

In addition to this complaint, the syllabus he proposes spends a full third of the classtime watching documentaries. One third! To me, this is just lazy lecturing. Plus, if he thinks sitting through a lecture is boring (is it, really?), has he tried to stay awake through "God in America" or almost any Ken Burns' documentary? I usually last about 15 minutes before the saccharine music and the long, panning skyward shots have got me reaching for my afghan and increasing my horizontal ratio. Plus, is using as a model of the "typical" lecture the famous scene from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" ("Anyone? Anyone?") really fair? It's certainly not my approach to the classroom, and I doubt it's anyone's.

On the other hand, Calder makes a good case for how we learn (and therefore how our students' learn).

One of his best arguments is that we learn when it matters, and a test isn't quite good enough to create "mattering." This got me thinking: what if I restructured my 16-week survey around 16 topics that slide chronologically forward. For instance, assuming that the industrial revolution is a meritorious starting point, what if we spend the first day going through technological breakthroughs in American life, then pull back to the late 19th century to see how we got to where we are today. The next week could be an investigation of, say, why Chicago (my city) is so racially segregated today. Clearly Reconstruction and the New South and the Great Migration would come up. Then third, the role of women in politics, which will highlight the Progressive Era movement toward female suffrage. Then the relationship between government and industry, a la the New Deal. Etc.

How To Prepare for a High-Stakes Test

Here are some tips from The Wall Street Journal:

• Test yourself repeatedly a few hours before the test.  Do not re-read the textbook chapter.
• If you are facing a test on the digestive system, practice explaining how it works from start to finish, rather than studying a list of its parts. 
• Take practice exams (in the case of the SAT, GRE, LSAT, or other tests) repeatedly.
• Review the toughest material right before going to bed
• Don't wake up earlier than usual to study
• All-nighters are a bad idea.
• Eat breakfast.  High-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods like oatmeal are best.
• Eat a balanced diet up to a week before the test.
• Do not listen to music or text your friends while studying.
• Avoid test-day anxiety by imagining that the test is a rigorous challenge that you enjoy (i.e. playing a sport or mountain climbing).
• Write down your worries about the exam.

Good luck!

E.J. Dionne Wonders if the Pope Will be Joining Occupy Wall Street

The recent statement by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace sounds a lot like some of things the Occupy Wall Street folks are saying.  Dionne explains:

Will we soon see a distinguished-looking older man in long, white robes walking among the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in New York’s Zuccotti Park? Is Pope Benedict XVI joining the protest movement? 

Well, yes and no. Yes, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a strong and thoughtful critique of the global financial system this week that paralleled many of the criticisms of unchecked capitalism that are echoing through Lower Manhattan and cities around the world.

The report spoke of “the primacy of being over having,” of “ethics over the economy,” and of “embracing the logic of the global common good.”

In a knock against those who oppose government economic regulation, the council emphasized “the primacy of politics — which is responsible for the common good — over the economy and finance.” It commented favorably on a financial transactions tax and supported an international authority to oversee the global economy.

But Vatican officials were careful to say that their report was not a direct response to the worldwide demonstrations. “It is a coincidence that we share some views,” said Bishop Mario Toso, secretary of the council. “But after all, these are proposals that are based on reasonableness.”

Read the rest here.

James Davison Hunter at Messiah College

I did not get a chance to attend James Davison Hunter's lecture last night at Messiah College.  I was in Lafayette Hill speaking about my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? to the American Revolution Roundtable of Philadelphia.

But have no fear!  My trusty student assistant, Katie Garland, attended the lecture and provided me with a great set of notes.  What follows is my narrative reconstruction of Katie's notes.

Hunter began by asking "What does it mean to be a Christian today?" and "How should Christians engage the world?"  The dominant approach that Christians employ today in their engagement with culture is activism, or the attempt to transform the societal structures by invoking a prophetic voice.  According to Hunter, Christians spend a lot of money doing this, but they do not accomplish much.

Hunter then described three leading paradigms that Christians use to engage culture. 

1.  The Christian Right or the "Defensive Against Paradigm."  The objective of this paradigm is to retain a distinctive version of orthodoxy or orthopraxy.  The Christian Right has a proprietary relationship to American culture.  In its attempt to reclaim the culture, the Christian Right has created a complex empire of parallel Christian institutions.  Its goal is to hold back secularization until Christianity becomes dominant again.  This goal is accomplished by evangelizing unbelievers and launching attacks against the enemies of Christianity.

2.  The Christian Left or the "Relevance To Paradigm."  The Christian Left, according to Hunter, is trying to re-symbolize Christianity to reflect modernism and secular life.  The Christian Left believes that all people become orthodox as the creed evolves to embrace what people already believe.

3. The Neo-Anabaptist or "Purity From" paradigm. Neo-Anabaptists believe that the world is irredeemable and the church must remove itself from the world's contaminating influence.  It is rooted in the so-called "2 Kingdoms" view of the church and the world.

All three of these views, Hunter suggested, misconstrue the true challenges facing the church.

Instead, Hunter offers a fourth way (so to speak) called "Faithful Presence Within."  This paradigm is rooted in the incarnation ("word became flesh") and a God who pursues us, identifies with us, is good, true, and peaceful, is active, intentional, and wholehearted, and is ever present in our lives.

Faithful Presence requires Christians to:

• be fully present to others in and out of the church.
• be fully present and committed to tasks and work
• be fully present in social influence. (family, neighborhood, place of employment).
• do what they are able to shape institutions and individuals for Christ through faithful presence
• enact Shalom and sacrificial love wherever God places you.

Those who want to bring change in society through prophetic preaching or radical activism may not necessarily like Hunter's model.  He is calling for Christians to be patient and invest, over the long haul, in places and communities.  He is calling Christians to listen, understand, and serve others. 

I think Hunter's message resonates with several themes that are often discussed at this blog.  First, Hunter's vision is compatible with agrarian writers such as Wendell Berry who challenge humans to stay put and enact change at the local level. 

Second, Hunter's vision is compatible with the kinds of things I have been saying lately about the study of history and the humanities.  The study of the past does not produce prophets or radical activists in the progressive, populist, or New Left tradition.  Rather, it produces world-changers who are skilled in the virtues of hospitality, civility, humility, and empathy because they have learned to listen before condemning and show charity before criticizing.

For me, Hunter's vision for change is the most satisfying Christian paradigm for cultural engagement that I have encountered.

Rakove Reviews Brookhiser's Biography of James Madison

Jack Ravoke, professor of history at Stanford, wonders why conservatives love James Madison so much: 

GO TO THE homepage of the Federalist Society, and you will discover that its logo is a profile of James Madison. Whether Madison (as opposed to, say, Hamilton) is the best icon for this celebrated consociation of conservative lawyers and law students could be subject to some dispute. Madison’s revealing proposal, in 1787, to give Congress the power to negate state laws, which he wanted to use to protect individual and minority rights, could just as easily qualify him as a trademark for the ACLU. His criticisms in the 1790s of presidential abuse of the powers of war and diplomacy hardly accord with neo-conservative doctrine or the take-no-prisoners constitutionalism of Dick Cheney and his legal saber, David Addington. Yet Madison’s profound awareness of the difficulty of constitution-making reveals a conservative sensitivity to the dangers of the experiment he had just pioneered. Some of Madison’s writings on representation echo themes that we associate with Burke, whom intellectually grounded conservatives so deeply admire, even while American conservatism now appears to be plunging into a know-nothing vacuum that its modern pioneers, such as the late William Buckley, would have abhorred.

This is the opening paragraph of Rakove's review of Richard Brookhiser's new biography of James Madison (Basic Books, 2011).  Here is an additional taste:

With his long association with Buckley’s National Review, Richard Brookhiser might seem the best writer available to explain why Madison might be a conservative icon. Brookhiser has become a major player in the literary-historical cult of “founders’ chic,” and by my count this is his eighth contribution to the trade. Yet portraying Madison as a conservative of foundational stature is not in fact the path that Brookhiser takes. For one thing, interpretation in any serious sense of that term is at best a modest feature of this book: much of it is simply a narrative into which Madison is made to fit. Reading this book is another reminder of the differences between the respective approaches of journalists and scholars to the same life. Brookhiser’s biography may be the quickest-paced biography I have ever read. Knowing the background (as a scholar must) left me either gasping or gaping at how quickly Brookhiser can reduce significant points to the shortest statement possible. Indeed at points his biography struck me as a sort of adult version of the Landmark Books I was reading by third or fourth grade (back around the time that Mr. Cub started playing shortstop at Wrigley Field).

Brookhiser saves his central argument for his final pages, and it might have been wiser to bring it out more explicitly much earlier, the better to explain the latent emphasis of his effort. Madison left two legacies, Brookhiser suggests. One is the manifest legacy—the monument of “American constitutionalism,” Brookhiser calls it, just as Sir Christopher Wren made St. Paul’s Cathedral, his burial site, his monument. This means not merely the primal documents (the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, The Federalist) with which Madison is associated, but also “the laws of doing and not doing, and all the debate and revisions they have generated.” Here Madison is the author of the documents and modes of constitutional argument that give our tradition its underlying form. But Madison’s “other monument, coequal if not greater,” Brookhiser concludes, “is American politics,” meaning “the behavior that makes constitutionalism work.” This is the Madison who, even more than his ally Jefferson, constructed the first political party system of the 1790s, and who came to understand that the dominant force in republican politics was a public opinion that one could both educate and manipulate. This Madison is manifestly a political actor, making contingent decisions good and bad, and not simply a serious intellectual—arguably America’s greatest political thinker—whose legacy lies in the Constitution, its first ten amendments, and his twenty-nine essays in The Federalist.

Dalrymple: What's Right About the Christian Right

Tim Dalrymple, the editor of my Confessing History column at Patheos, has been critical of the Christian Right, but he also finds much that is good in the movement.  Here is a taste of his recent post at his blog, Philosophical Fragments.

Yet I now feel no desire to distance myself from the people in the Religious Right.  Rather, on Saturday I was proud to be in their midst.  These are people who believe that life is an inestimable gift and a sacred treasure, to uphold and protect from the very first moment of conception to the very last breath.  These are people who believe that marriage should honor the pattern shown in scripture, that children should be reared by loving mothers and fathers, that families form the best bulwark against poverty, and that our culture should give careful thought to the influences and temptations it puts in front of its young people.  And these are people who believe that the government should form a final safety net, but that families and churches and local institutions should be the first line of defense, and the second and the third — that our commitment to the social good should be wise and should steward our resources for generations, rather than excusing and facilitating generations of poverty — that the government has a role to play in regulating the economy and defending against unfair business practices, but that its influence should be as minimal as possible in order to maximize freedom and maintain the efficiency of the free market — and that our market should encourage creativity, initiative and self-reliance, the dignity of man made in the image of a Creator God.  They also believe that a culture that is richly seeded with what is truly true and good and beautiful, and leaders who are shaped by classical Judeo-Christian values, can have an extraordinarily beneficial effect upon our nation.

These are among my own deepest convictions on social matters as well.  In other words, I think what the Religious Right has right is vastly more important than what it has wrong.

Do Good Debaters Make Good Presidents?

With the vast array of GOP pre-primary debates taking place these days, The New York Times has called together a group of experts to reflect on just how important debating skills are to being President of the United States.

An impressive array of historians and writers have chimed in, including Jon Meacham, H.W. Brands, Robert Dallek, Joan Hoff, Alonzo Hamby, and David Gergen.  Here is a taste of Hamby's piece:

Clearly quite a number of past chief executives would have been TV washouts. Jefferson, for example, is acknowledged to have been a terrible public speaker, Madison an unimpressive little man in voice and appearance. John Quincy Adams was probably insufferably pedantic. Andrew Jackson was prone to choke up with rage. Clay, Webster, and Calhoun would likely be thought windbags today.

Lincoln, who seems so eloquent to us, on the other hand, got low marks from contemporary observers.

Probably the best debaters from the pre-electronic age were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom seem to have enjoyed speaking before big audiences, were quick reactors, and expressed themselves in complete sentences. Now that would be a debate! Let’s not talk about ratings, however.

And let’s not blame the flat panel screen. Television is perfectly capable of broadcasting substance if there is a market for it. How many of us really want extended discussion of hard issues?

Darren Grem Receives Woodward Prize

Congratulations to Darren Grem, the 2011 recipient of the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize from The Southern Historical Association.  Grem recieved his Ph.D at the University of Georgia in 2010 and is currently doing a post-doc at Emory University.

Paul Harvey of "Religion in American History" fame (and one of our finest historians of southern religion) will be in Baltimore to present Grem the award.  Here is a snippet of the remarks that Harvey will deliver on Friday:

Dr. Grem’s dissertation “follows the money” of American evangelicalism through the twentieth century, focusing on the relationship between corporate capitalism, southern entrepreneurs, and the rise of evangelical institutions. Individual chapters trace the innovations in funding and Christian entrepreneurship from figures as diverse as Billy Graham, R. G. LeTourneau, the founder of Chic-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby, and evangelists such as Billy Graham and the Wycliffe Bible Translators. The result is a rich and complex analysis which places corporate capitalism squarely within the world of southern evangelicals through the twentieth century, much like C. Vann Woodward himself did with the world of the “Redeemers” and the New South movement. It’s one of the finest and most important works in American religious, intellectual, and economic history that I’ve read in a considerable time, and the fact that it combines all three of those fields I’m sure is one of the things that made it so attractive to Oxford University Press. 

Congratulations!

Virginia Elementary School Teacher Is The Gilder-Lehrman National History Teacher of the Year

Congratulations to Stacy Hoeflich, a fourth grade teacher at John Adams Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia.  Here is a taste of the Gilder-Lehrman press release:

Ms. Hoeflich was nominated for the award by Dr. Kelly Schrum, Director of Educational Projects at the Center of History and New Media, at George Mason University, who said, "Hoeflich is devoted to the teaching and learning of history.  After seeing the students in her classroom excitedly puzzle over a difficult map created four hundred years ago or political cartoons from the last century, I am confident that students leave her classroom with a lifelong interest in understanding the complexities of the past.”  Focusing on both local and national history, Ms. Hoeflich takes an interdisciplinary approach to her instruction.  Using primary sources to help students connect to history on a personal level, she has helped her students engage American history creatively by writing and producing student operas on George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, and Virginia’s Indians.

Mark Noll on Protestantism Today

With the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation about six years away, Notre Dame's Mark Noll reflects on the current state of Protestantism in a piece at the Huffington Post.  Here is a taste:


...And today? Nearly 500 years after Luther's initial provocation in Wittenberg, Protestants and Protestant-like movements are all over the map, both literally and figuratively. The recently published "Atlas of World Christianity" enumerates about 500,000,000 adherents to churches and denominations that trace their descent directly or indirectly from 16th century Protestant beginnings and several hundred millions more in "independent" churches with Protestant origins or strongly Protestant characteristics.

The dynamic recent changes in world Christianity that have been well described by Philip Jenkins, Dana Robert and other outstanding scholars have affected Protestants even more than other Christians. A century ago, roughly three-fifths of the world's identifiable Protestants lived in Europe, with another third in the United States. Today, almost three-fourths of identifiable Protestants live outside of Europe and the United States. More Anglicans go to church regularly in each of Nigeria and Uganda than in Britain and America (as Episcopalians) combined. Ethiopia, Tanzania and Madagascar all have Lutheran denominations as large as the biggest Lutheran denominations in the United States. There are far more identifiable Pentecostals in Brazil than in the United States. Among the countries with the most rapid recent Protestant expansion have been Armenia, Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Nepal and -- most significantly -- China. As observant students have noticed, the recent expansion of non-western Protestant churches has been driven much less by missionaries from Europe and America than by local believers establishing local movements in response to local needs.

It was a challenge when asked to write the "Protestantism" volume for Oxford University Press's "Very Short Introduction" series to make sense out of a movement with very distinct origins in early modern Europe that now is predominately located where the preoccupations of that earlier time and place are not even a memory. How, in other words, to incorporate into one story both Martin Luther and David Yonggi Cho, the Pentecostal pastor of the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea, which with its nearly one million members has for many years been the world's largest Christian congregation?

An Airman Stationed Overseas Reads a Story to His Daughter

 

Consumer Spending, Not Private Investment, Stimulates Economic Growth

James Livingston, a historian at Rutgers and the author of the forthcoming Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul, writes today in the The New York Times:

As an economic historian who has been studying American capitalism for 35 years, I’m going to let you in on the best-kept secret of the last century: private investment — that is, using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth. 


This is, to put it mildly, a controversial claim. Economists will tell you that private business investment causes growth because it pays for the new plant or equipment that creates jobs, improves labor productivity and increases workers’ incomes. As a result, you’ll hear politicians insisting that more incentives for private investors — lower taxes on corporate profits — will lead to faster and better-balanced growth.

The general public seems to agree. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll in May, a majority of Americans believe that increased corporate taxes “would discourage American companies from creating jobs.”

But history shows that this is wrong. 

Read the rest here.

I am eager to read Livingston's book (it will be released next month) to see how he makes the argument that consumerism is good for one's soul.  I am intrigued.

On the Road in November

It's been a busy fall, but I have met some wonderful people and have had the opportunity to talk about history, the place of religion in the American founding, and the ways in which the study of the past can transform us and contribute to a more civil society.  Here is what I am up to in November:

On November 3, I will be at the David Library of the American Revolution in Washington Crossing, PA doing a public lecture on the role that religion played in the framing of the United States Constitution.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

On November 6, I begin a four-week Sunday School class on Was America Founded as a Christian Nation at the West Shore Evangelical Free Church in Mechanicsburg, PA.  The classes are free and open to the public.

On November 9, I will be giving a lunch talk on The Way of Improvement Leads Home to the members of the Olde Towne Cumberland Association in New Cumberland, PA.

On November 10, I will be in Savannah, Georgia for a Gilder-Lehrman Institute/Teaching American History Seminar with school teachers from Savannah.  I will be lecturing on the Enlightenment in America.

My family and I are looking forward to being with the Messiah College History Club on November 12. I will be leading a tour of the Gettysburg Battlefield.

November 17 will be a very busy day.  In the morning I will be in Brooklyn doing a Gilder-Lehrman Institute seminar on Was America Founded for a group of teachers from the Archdiocese of New York.  Then in the evening I will be back in the Harrisburg area for a lecture on William Penn's view of religious pluralism.  This lecture is part of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission's 2011 "Religion" theme.  The Penn lecture is free and open to the public. Check the blog for more details.

On November 29th I will be video teleconferencing, via Skype, with a group of Assembly of God pastors from Springfield, MO.  The topic will be Was America Founded as a Christian Nation.

Finally, on November 30, I will return to Brooklyn for another Gilder-Lehrman Institute session with Catholic school teachers from the Archdiocese from New York.

This Week's Patheos Column: The Historian as Activist

Tara is former student of mine. She was an undergraduate history major who now works at a children's hospital in the Republic of Malawi, Africa. Her job consists of spending time with sick African children. She plays with them, builds relationships with them and their parents, listens to them, empathizes with their struggles, and then tells their stories to western Christians through a variety of social media outlets.

To borrow a phrase from James Davison Hunter's To Change the World, Tara is "faithfully present" in the lives of these Malawi children and their families. She is devoting her life to something greater than her own ambitions. She is an agent of change in the world.

And she landed this job because and not in spite of the fact that she was a history major in college.

Read the rest here.

"Thunder Road" Makes TIME's List of the Top 100 Songs

See the list here.  It is made up of the best English-language songs since 1923, the year Time was founded.  I was also glad to see that Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song," Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues," Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin," Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," and Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" made the list.

Critical Distance and the Biographer: The Case of Walter Isaacson's Biography of Steve Jobs

Joe Nacera thinks Walter Isaacson's newly released biography of Steve Jobs falls flat.  He explains in The New York Times.  Here is a taste:

Part of the problem, I think, is that the bond that developed between subject and writer made it nearly impossible for Isaacson to get the kind of critical distance he needed to take his subject’s true measure. He didn’t just interview Jobs; he watched him die. There is a moving scene near the end of the book, with an emaciated Jobs, lying in bed, leafing through photographs with Isaacson, reminiscing. How can one possibly get critical distance about your subject when such moments are part of your experience of him?

“I think there will be a lot in your book that I won’t like,” Jobs tells Isaacson during that conversation, two months before he died. Isaacson agrees, but I don’t. Jobs’s bad behavior is something he never denied. He rationalized it as his way of getting the most out of people — and Isaacson largely accepts this rationalization. An alternative notion — that Jobs was an emotional child his whole life — is something the readers have to come to themselves, by reading between the lines.

When you think about it, it is rare for a truly great biography to be written about someone who is living; in my lifetime, the only one I can think of is “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses. When the subjects are alive — and Jobs was still alive when this book was finished — biographers always feel them looking over their shoulders, and pushing back. Jobs does that often with Isaacson, rejecting, for instance, the idea that his own abandonment by his natural parents had a major effect on him. Invariably, at such moments, Isaacson backs off and gives Jobs the last word.

There is another kind of distance biographies of the living lack — the distance of time. It can take decades to truly understand the context in which the subject’s life and achievements played out. Often we need to see what happens after he is gone to realize his true impact on our world. Steve Jobs has been dead for three weeks. We’re not even close to that understanding.

In “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson has recounted a life — a big, sprawling, amazing life. It is a serious accomplishment. What remains for future biographers is to make sense of that life. 

What do you think?  Does a biographer, or any historian for that matter, need to have critical distance from his or her subject in order to be effective?

Reynolds Reviews Horwitz's Midnight Rising

Over at The Wall Street Journal, David Reynolds, the author of a recent book on Harriett Beecher's Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, reviews Tony Horwitz's new book on John Brown, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.  (Reynolds, I should add, is also the author of a book on Brown).  Here is a taste from the conclusion of the review:

...To emphasize what he calls the "manifest implausibility" of Brown's scheme, Mr. Horwitz presents him as a maladroit leader with a fragmented following. Brown had "poor judgment of personnel," Horwitz tell us—as though there was ample opportunity in the 1850s to sort through a field of candidates ready to join a dangerous mission in the South. Mr. Horwitz notes that Brown's Northern supporters and his own soldiers often quarreled with him about battle plans—as though anyone in that decade could envisage a sure military strategy against the South. (Lincoln, for one, said in 1858 that war was not even an option against slavery.)

In "Midnight Rising," Mr. Horwitz corrects a fact here and there, adds some human anecdotes and local history, and records such details as the degree to which the various hanged bodies quivered after the noose had done its work. But much of his book is a gloss of what is already known

As for the figure at the center of the story, Mr. Horwitz sees him too often as the grim Old Man of long-ago histories: bold, arrogant, sly, fanatical, murderous, muddle-headed and possibly insane. One has to think that, with their more admiring view, Emerson and Thoreau were closer to the truth.

Dispatches from Graduate School--Part 39

Cali Pitchel McCullough is a Ph.D student in American history at Arizona State University. For earlier posts in this series click here. --JF 

I always enjoy my time in Southern California. Every six weeks I take a quick flight from Phoenix into Burbank to spend the weekend visiting a few of my favorite people. My uncle, a PR executive, lives in Sherman Oaks, and a close friend works for the Associated Press and lives one block off Hollywood Blvd. My geographical zone remains relatively small while visiting. I might enjoy the sunshine and cool air in my uncle’s backyard, or I stay with my friend in her tiny apartment, watching chick flicks and eating take-out.

During the past weekend, I ventured out of my typical routine and drove north and west along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu. Rather than celebrity-watch at a beachside café, I spent Saturday participating in the Western Regional Conference on Faith and History. The Conference met on the campus of Pepperdine University, situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I drove the meandering road from the 101 Freeway into the Malibu Valley before the sunshine and heat dispelled the morning fog, but after the second panel the haze lifted. The ocean views made conference-going a difficult option, but the intriguing panel line-up drew me inside.

The conference theme, “The Historian and the Text,” seemed the perfect forum to discuss History to the People. I submitted my unorthodox proposal to Bryan Lamkin, the President of the Western Regional chapter of the CFH and Professor of History at Azusa Pacific University. My proposal looked more like a call to action than scholarly research, but it undoubtedly aligned with the theme of the conference. To break down the barriers between academic historians and people and to provide the general public with the skills necessary to think historically are two of the main tenants of HTTP. 

I presented in a panel entitled “Public Texts” with Steven Wentland, a Professor of Liberal Studies at Azusa Pacific. Dr. Wentland examines the challenges teachers face incorporating the study of religion into lesson plans (despite their overwhelming presence in state standards). He offers some prescriptions, because he suggests “you can’t understand American history without studying religion.”

Ryan McIlhenny, from Providence Christian College, provided comments for Dr. Wentland and I. Dr. McIlhenny suggested we had several points in common, most importantly, our commitment to preserving democracy and diversity in the study of history. HTTP will attempt, through a more democratic use of the historian’s tools, to teach others to lay aside self-interest and see the world from the perspective of someone else. As John Fea suggests, “unlike any other discipline, history requires us to engage the human condition primarily through understanding and empathy, not criticism.” This quote gets to the second point in common between Dr. Wentland and I—the culture wars. If a person encounters the text with the necessary tools, it becomes less easy to condemn the actions of other people. Perhaps we can ease our culture wars by disclosing the ways in which we’ve honed our historical thinking and encouraging such behavior in more people in a more intentional way.

The audience seemed enthusiastic about HTTP. Aside from some brief discussion on this blog, I have not had the chance to present the idea to an academic audience (other than my classmates). I received great questions at the end: How will we achieve nuance and complexity in short blog posts? How will we reorientate the way in which people think about history? How will we protect ourselves against bias? These are great questions, some of which I have already spent a good deal of time thinking through. At HTTP we value specificity and we write and edit in a community. This keeps us morally engaged, accountable, and self-critical. A willingness to work collaboratively, in a community of scholars open to debate and dialogue and the testing of ideas keeps us honest—this goes for all good history.

I had a great experience at the Western Regional CFH. It provided me the opportunity to not only present an idea, but it also gave me the opportunity to think about how my faith plays a role in my commitment to bring history to the people. In preparing for the conference I found a quote by Henri Nouwen, a twentieth century priest and writer. Nouwen, meditating on the gifts given to a body of believers, believed that “the basis of all ministry is the experience of God’s unlimited and unlimiting acceptance of us as beloved children, an acceptance so full, so total, and all-embracing, that it sets us free from our compulsion to be seen, praised, and admired and frees us for Christ, who leads us on the road of service. This experience of God’s acceptance frees us from our needy self and thus creates new space where we can pay selfless attention to others.” Because I have acquired certain skills, I have a responsibility to use these skills in service to others. The website provides a space for me to share these skills outside the classroom, and in hopes, foster a sense of historical thinking that might change the world one person at a time.