Tag Archives: Bethel College and Seminary
Following Up: A Veterans Day Story on the G.I. Bill
Today’s Veterans Day edition of the Minneapolis StarTribune features a story on the 70th anniversary of the G.I. Bill, including some comments from me on that legislation’s impact on Bethel College and Seminary in the years after World War II. Reporter Kevyn Burger contacted me after coming across this blog — specifically, my late June post on […]
‘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 […]
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, 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: 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 […]
The G.I. Bill Turns 70
Seventy years ago this past Sunday, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen’s Adjustment Act of 1944. While World War II still had over ten months to go in Europe, and over a year in the Pacific, the so-called “G.I. Bill” made possible dramatic changes in postwar America. Pres. Barack Obama summarized them […]
A Bethel War Memorial?
In the last two years I’ve developed an interest in the history of war commemoration, writing about it from time to time at my personal blog and even keeping — very irregularly — a photoblog on the subject. So as I’ve started to research how Bethel and other colleges and universities here in the Twin Cities experienced […]
Introductions: Vietnam and the War on Terror
When Chris and I started divvying up research tasks, my inclination was to focus on Vietnam and the War on Terror. This much is surprising – despite my being reasonably cognizant for 9/11 and the subsequent military actions those events sparked, I know less about the War on Terror than any of the conflicts we’re […]
Bethel at War 1914 - 2014 