Category Vietnam War
‘Accounting’ for Shoddiness: Professionalization at Bethel
While crunching through the Clarion, I came across an interesting article from February 17, 1965: “School Employs CPA to Upgrade Accounting.” The article was occasioned by the hiring of one Ken White, CPA for Bethel’s accounting and financial affairs division. Except, calling it the “accounting and financial affairs division” is probably somewhat too generous. While the […]
Christian Service Brigade
I’ve noted in a previous post how the Baptist General Conference retreated from debating the Vietnam War in 1968, a quiescence which would persist to the end. Part of that retreat included what I termed an “invasion of the domestic.” Here’s how I described that shift as it related to the chaplaincy: Whereas in previous years […]
A College’s Denomination: The BGC and the Vietnam War, 1970-1975 (Conclusion)
This is the last of a five part series on the Baptist General Conference during the Vietnam War era. You may find it helpful to begin reading from the beginning. ❧ Writing this post feels a bit like an unnecessary repetition. The themes covered in the previous installment continue, unaltered in content and purpose: the military […]
The Cartoons of the Clarion, 1964-1975
In the spirit of the Saturday morning cartoon, today I’d like to look at the cartoons of the Clarion student newspaper. Earlier this week, I undertook a marathon research session to canvass the Clarion. Using a time line identical to that which I’m employed to study the BGC, I reviewed all Clarions from the calendar years 1964-1975, and sporadically beyond […]
A College’s Denomination: The BGC and the Vietnam War, 1968-1969 (Part 4)
This is part four of a five part series. If you haven’t yet done so, you may find it helpful to read parts one, two, and three of this series for context. Today, we’ll look at the years 1968-69 in the Baptist General Conference. Those two years saw sustained, often violent protest in America’s campuses and cities – and […]
A College’s Denomination: The BGC and the Vietnam War, 1964-1967 (Part 3)
We are convinced that war destroys all Christian values, including the destruction of human lives, rights and properties; that the possibility of plunging the human race into an unimaginable holocaust of death and destruction through nuclear warfare is ever upon us… — Proposed resolution on War and Peace, 1966 BGC Annual Conference ❧ In this […]
A College’s Denomination: An Exercise in Contrasts (Part 2)
Several weeks ago, I teased a series I planned to write on the Baptist General Conference during the Vietnam years. On Wednesday, I introduced that series. Today’s post was intended as the first of the three parts, but after a few hours of work on that post, I realised that there were too many background problems to […]
A College’s Denomination: The BGC and the Vietnam War – Introduction (Part 1)
These past weeks have seen me move increasingly from secondary literature into primary sources. In particular, I’ve been paging steadily through the Standard, the official organ of the Baptist General Conference – then Bethel College’s sponsoring denomination – which ran from 1940 to 2002. That year the magazine became BGC World and in 2008 when the denomination changed its name to Converge […]
The Professoriate Turns: Evangelical Antiwar Dissent at Calvin College
A few weeks ago I looked broadly at the Evangelical left and Vietnam, focusing particularly on Jim Wallis and the Post Americans. Of course, not all evangelicals who ended up opposing the war would have described themselves as leftists, nor would they have been comfortable with the extent to which the Post Americans critiqued American […]
“Traveling by ‘Holy Helo'”
Paging through the July 4, 1966 issue of the Standard, I came across a small article that caught my attention. It’s rather vividly written by a Baptist General Conference navy chaplain, Kenneth Carlson, and describes how Carlson ‘choppered’ between vessels to hold worship services for U.S. Navy sailors. First though, I was curious whether Carlson ever […]
Bethel at War 1914 - 2014 