'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Blog

Paul Harvey

Excuse the interruption, but I'd doing a little crowdsource experiment and am interested in getting any comments you have.

We are busy doing some "updates" to my home department, the History Department at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Like a lot of departments, we're trying to figure out how best to communicate with our students. In our case, it's more difficult than it might be in some others, as we have students ranging in age from 18 to 70, most of whom work a lot (a large number full time). Some of them take classes in the daytime, some in the evening, some on Saturdays. We also have nearly 300 history majors, a lot for a busy regular faculty of 8 members to keep up with. We have some students living on campus, but the majority of our students, I believe, are commuters. Even the students living on campus spend a lot of time away from school working.

I've created a blog for my Department, and am very interested especially in hearing from anybody who has used blogs/FB/twitter or whatever to communicate with students in your history/religious studies/American Studies/English/whatever departments. My thought was this would take the place of a departmental "newsletter," or maybe be in addition to that.

But truthfully I'm not sure how much students read blogs at all, never mind when it's not assigned reading. John Fea, whose history department at Messiah College has a nice blog of its own, already has told me that nearly all of his students "get" the blog through their facebook feeds. I don't doubt some of our students would do that, but a lot of our older students don't use facebook.

Anyway, feel free to give the UCCS History Department blog experiment a quick look, and let me know if you have any reactions or what your experiences have been using any kind of social media in your own departmental setting.

Now, with apologies for the interruption, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Dante for Dentists: The Resurrection of Christian History Magazine

by Elesha Coffman

Back before I started graduate school, and thus (ironically) before I had any idea what I was talking about, I edited a magazine called Christian History. Each quarterly issue focused on a person or theme, ranging just in my short years on staff from St. Antony and the Desert Fathers to the Huguenots, Dante to Historiography, religion in the American West to Thomas Aquinas. The magazine occupied a unique position as a bridge between the academy and “the rest of the world,” as most of the authors were scholars while most of the readers were—if I remember our market research aright—pastors, teachers, and dentists. A few years after I left, the magazine was shuttered for lack of revenue. I was sad to see it go.

Long story short, the organization that launched the magazine nearly 30 years ago, the Christian History Institute, has resurrected the title. They have already published a 100^th issue (many subscribers kept all of their back-issues, so numbering mattered more than publication date), a timely history of the King James Bible, and they are now seeking input on future issue topics. I pass this information along both because some readers of this blog might wish to check out the magazine and because the topical survey offers insight into the interests of non-scholarly readers. The potential topics survey recipients were asked to rate are:

George Muller
Amy Carmichael
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
History of Worship Music
The church’s involvement in the abolition of slavery in America
Vatican II’s impact on the worldwide church
History of Catechism (Early Church, Luther, etc.)
History of Presbyterianism
The Christian face of Ellis Island
Philip Schaff, the “father of church history”
The modern history of Christian charity
The African Church Fathers: Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement, Origen, Athanasius
History of Baptism
Charlemagne, 9^th century Holy Roman Emperor
Women mystics of the middle ages: Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena
George Fox, William Penn, and the Quakers

I have no idea which topics will score highest or actually be published in coming years. If I were still editor, I would have drafted a rather different list, though this one has several strong entries. Overall, the list reaffirms two things I learned through my experience at the magazine:

1. There are people outside the academy who care about religious history—and you can find a lot of them in churches. It is a persistent concern of mine that religion scholars’ fight for credibility in the (presumed) secular academy has cut them off from a still strongly religious public. I’m not saying that the public with an appetite for rigorous yet accessible church history is huge, but Christian History enjoyed a circulation of just under 50,000 when I was there, and that’s a whole lot more people than a university press can get to read a monograph.

2. 2. 2. Lay readers do not need to be pandered to. For every History of Worship Music Christian History delivered right over the plate, it also pitched a curveball like Solzhenitsyn. We used to call the latter “broccoli” issues, but we served them up the best we could, and the percentage of subscribers who intended to renew stayed in the 90s. The proposed topic that polled the best during my tenure was Aquinas—and my readers were overwhelmingly evangelical Protestants.

I wish the folks at CHI luck, reconnecting with that audience of educated non-specialists we academics too often fail to reach.

Beck's Long Goodbye

Kelly Baker



On this past Thursday night, Glenn Beck said goodbye to Fox News and television sets, and hello to GBTV, his internet news channel. Here's a recap of the last show involving Jon Stewart, Hitler, and God. Over at Religion Dispatches, I editorialize about his departure, his legacy of history-making, and his brand of nationalism. Here's a glimpse:

Much of the coverage concludes that Beck is, at best, “bonkers.” Alex Pareene of Salon.com, however, realizes that perhaps this is not “some sort of victory”; that leaving Fox is not the end of Beck, but rather that his legacy might not be as a talking head but as an amateur historian, the creator of Beck University, with a clear, and popular, articulation of nation. The tagline for BU promises, “learn history as it really happened” with David Barton responsible for courses labeled Faith 101, 102, and 103, in which students can (of course) learn about the faith of the Founding Fathers.

Beck’s mantle of telling history like it really “was” is packaged, glossy, and consumed. Yet this mantle, or even legacy, does not solely belong to him. The struggle to reclaim the nation, or “restore honor,” began long before he, the John Birch Society, Joseph McCarthy and the like joined it in the mid-twentieth century. Americans, from the Reconstruction Klan in the 1860s, the Know Nothings of the 1890s to the second Klan of the 1910s and 1920s, to home-grown Christian fascists of the 1930s, sought to protect a nation in peril from any perceived threat, be it Catholic, Jew, African American, or Communist.

Glory Hallelujah: While Barton Marches On, Historians Live to Fight Another Day

Paul Harvey

By popular demand, I feel compelled to post this link to today's New York Times piece about the political influence of self-styled historian David Barton, and to this link to Barton 's appearance on the Jon Stewart show (and for a critique of it, see here). He puts on his best public face for Stewart, but sheds it when throwing out the red meat about the Terrible Oppression Visited on American Christians for his WallBuilders' radio audience and other friendly venues, as discussed here and here among many other places. Perhaps most to the point here, his relentlessly entrepreneurial streak has elevated him from fringe to center, and given him an impressive political power base as the house historian for any number of potential presidential candidates. To which I can only say: that is so not awesome!

Forthcoming soon will be my co-blogmeister Randall Stephens' book The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (co-authored with Karl Giberson), in which a series of evangelical experts in "history" (Barton), "science" (Ken Ham) and other fields, who collectively constitute one of those mathematically possible alternative universes that the string theorists are always theorizing and talking about, are analyzed and set within context.

But in truth, Barton's ideological entrepreneurialism, and the pointless debates on trivialities that he has provoked (did Washington say so help me God -- who the hell cares, and who knows, maybe Jesus actually said "blessed are the cheesemakers'" as Monty Python speculated, is my answer), has just kind of worn me out, and I'd much rather call attention to real historians working on matters of scholarly/intellectual interest who also have a public voice and cache, and who engage the deepest and most transcendent issues with scholarly substance.

To that end, here's a story about historian and Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust's Jefferson Lecture, about war and its fascinations from Homer to Bin Laden.

Ms. Faust traced what she called "the seductiveness of war" to its location on the "boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman," and the possibility it offers of transcending "the gray everyday" of life. "Stories of war are infused with the aura of the consequential," she said in her talk, "Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian."They're also as difficult to tell as they are compelling. She described how writers and soldiers throughout history have tried to describe the experience of war, only to find it slipping away from them. "There remains a fundamental untellability and unintelligibility about war," she said, which only makes it more powerful as a subject.

For American History readers, Faust will be best known most recently for her work This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, discussed on our blog and reviewed here. Historian David Blight provides a fuller context for and a wonderful appreciation of Faust's scholarly career here.

Partly my attention to Faust's work came from the immediate political context of the jingoism of the Bin Laden celebrations set alongside the massive death and destruction of the last ten years -- a seemingly inevitable, if unsettling, part of how war stories unfold.

But more of it came from thinking of selecting works for next year's Civil War/Reconstruction class, as we enter the 150th anniversary. Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin reflects on Faust's address, expresses his ambivalent feelings about war re-enactments, and quotes from part of Faust's address:

And yet. Two months from now, we will again witness a reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run. Tens of thousands of participants and spectators are expected, for the enthusiasm to refight the Civil War has only grown in the fifty years since the centennial observances. Most of the costumed soldiers and camp followers will have read extensively about the war; they will wear garments accurate to the last button and stitch; they will use period weapons and canteens and knapsacks, for authenticity is the watchword of the thriving reenactor culture. They will in these myriad details get history just right. But what will they understand of war? Will this reenactment do any more to acknowledge the war’s purposes and politics and their continuing significance than did the reenactments of fifty years ago? Will its celebratory mood and mode acknowledge what Frederick Douglass declared he would never forget: “the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery”? Will the reenactors tell only an old “battle piece” of courage and glory and how sweet and proper it is to die? Will we in this historic sesquicentennial — to be observed at a time when Americans are involved in real conflicts in three sites across the globe— forget what a heavy responsibility rests on those whoseek to tell the stories of war?

The last time I did this course, I paired Faust's Republic of Suffering with another powerful book, Chandra Manning's What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War Kevin Levin usefully reviews it here; a useful contrast is his take on Gary Gallagher's The Union War, posted here); taking the two works together (Manning and Gallagher, I mean) gives one a good rundown on recent debates on how Americans of the time gave meaning to the war.

The result of the pairing of Faust and Manning -- one about the impossibility of a "good death" during the war, and the other about the larger socio-political meanings people gave to the sacrifices on both sides, was some of the most powerfully engaged student discussions I had ever seen, because the works compelled a profound consideration of the question Edward J. Blum raised in his review of Faust: was there ultimately a transcendent meaning in all this death? Was there life that emerged from the death-haunted republic of suffering? Was war a force that gave Civil-War era people meaning, and if so, how does that affect our perceptions of contemporary wars?

Eric Foner raises many of these same questions in his review of Gary Gallagher's new book The Union War in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review. In some contrast to Manning and a number of other contemporary historians, who see a significant shift in soldiers' attitudes through the course of the war, Gallagher argues that emancipation "always 'took a back seat' to the paramount goal of saving the Union. Most Northerners, he says, remained indifferent to the plight of the slaves. They embraced emancipation only when they concluded it had become necessary to win the war. They fought because they regarded the United States as a unique experiment in democracy that guaranteed political liberty and economic opportunity in a world overrun by tyranny." In effect, this was a war about the nation-state, with emancipation a somewhat accidental by-product. Gallagher and Manning both rely on an extensive body of research (including in the regimental newspapers, not often used by other historians) which brings in first-hand evidence from the soldiers (and their homefront supporters). Weighing that evidence, and trying to determine what represents the views of "many" or "most" soldiers, becomes one of the central points of contention here. I'm no expert on any of this, but the discussion raised has been terrific.

Foner challenges Gallagher's view by asking, essentially, what was this cruel war over? He concludes:

Before the war, slavery powerfully affected the concept of self-government. Large numbers of Americans identified democratic citizenship as a privilege of whites alone — a position embraced by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Which is why the transformation wrought by the Civil War was so remarkable. As George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, observed in 1865, the war transformed a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” That was something worth fighting for.

The "something" that was worth fighting for became the crux of the student discussions in my class (and countless other Civil War classes around the country, of course), and provided some moments of intellectual transcendence (and fierce debate). Barton et al aside, there's hope yet for the public presentation of serious history, including those which which centrally involve religious themes of meaning, purpose, violence, and the sacred.

Religion and the Liberal Public Realm

Randall Stephens

Over at the NYT's Opinionator blog Stanley Fish weighs in on "Religion and the Liberal State Once Again." An excerpt:

The question is what does the liberal state do with those religious believers [fundamentalists and the range of exclusivists]— the popular answer in the comments is “tell them to go back where they came from” — and my contention, and the only one I make (in agreement with John Milbank), is that the liberal state is incapable of doing anything with them except regard them, as many of the posters do, as fanatical, medieval, crazy, dictatorial and downright dangerous. As I point out, liberalism’s inability to regard strong religious claims — claims that spill out into public life — as anything but a mistake and a transgression is not something liberalism can correct or get beyond; it is the inevitable (and blameless) reflection of what liberalism is and must be if it is to sustain its particular, not to say peculiar, brand of universalism, a universalism that operates by reducing persons to formal entities, all of which are, in the essential political respect, exactly the same. (It’s universalism writ small.)

Fighting words, in some quarters. It will be interesting to read the blazing comments on the NYT and elsewhere. Mostly elsewhere.