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The Author’s Corner with Peter Boag

Rachel Petroziello   |  April 21, 2022

Peter Boag is Professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. This interview is based on his new book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon (University of Washington Press, 2022)....

The Author’s Corner with Robert Gross

Rachel Petroziello   |  January 10, 2022

Robert A. Gross is Emeritus Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. This interview is based on his new book, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). JF: What led you to ​write The Transcendentalists...

Religion does something that Instagram can’t

John Fea   |  March 18, 2021

Rabbi Juliana Karol gets it right in her letter to The New York Times. She is responding to this piece. . . . Entertainment suppresses the agency of its audience, rendering us passive observers. Faith is just the opposite, demanding...

Teaching Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

John Fea   |  March 10, 2021

This is a revised and updated version of a post originally published on March 6, 2020: After a couple weeks focusing on “creation” in my Created Called for Community (CCC) course at Messiah University, we have shifted gears slightly to focus on the...

Song of the Day

John Fea   |  November 1, 2020

“We Take Care of Our Own”: Back in 2012, I wrote a piece about this song at my old Patheos column: What is this experiment that we call the United States? What did Thomas Jefferson mean by the phrase “the...

Springsteen’s “House of 1000 Guitars”

John Fea   |  October 24, 2020

Letter to You is here. My favorite song so far is “House of 1000 Guitars”: I am sure people will interpret this song in different ways, but my interpretation starts with Springsteen himself. Here is a taste of Brian Hiatt’s...

When the Only Coffeeshop in Town Closes

John Fea   |  May 19, 2020

Here is Ruth Graham at Slate: Fewer than 3,000 people live in Warner. For this community, losing Schoodacs is shattering. My family and I saw someone we knew at the coffee shop every time we stopped in. Our next-door neighbor worked...

2015 Messiah College Graduate Grady Breen Is Doing What Messiah College History Majors Do

John Fea   |  May 16, 2020

What can you do with a history major? You can offer leadership and a path toward social healing in the midst of a suffering community. This is what 2015 Messiah College history major Grady Breen, a social studies teacher and...

Taking Care of Our Own

John Fea   |  March 19, 2020

I published this piece in 2012 when I was writing a column at Patheos.  I think it holds up pretty well. –JF What is this experiment that we call the United States? What did Thomas Jefferson mean by the phrase...

True Friendship and the Search for Meaning: Teaching Augustine’s *Confessions*

John Fea   |  March 14, 2020

Most of my students have never heard of Augustine of Hippo. Very few of them have read a 5th-century text. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when we discussed parts of Augustine’s Confessions in my Created and Called for Community...

Remember the Elderly

John Fea   |  March 13, 2020

This is an important reminder from Shai Held, president, dean, and chair in Jewish Thought at Hadar.  Here is a taste of his recent piece at The Atlantic: Why do I say “the elderly”? In its biblical context, the obligation to...

Teaching Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”

John Fea   |  March 10, 2020

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published his article “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital” in 1995. (His book titled Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community appeared in 2000). Last Friday, we read and discussed Putnam’s seminal article in...

Teaching MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

John Fea   |  March 6, 2020

After a couple weeks focusing on “creation” in my Created Called for Community (CCC) course at Messiah College, we have shifted gears slightly to focus on the meaning of “community.” Our first reading on this front was Martin Luther King...

Teaching Ernest L. Boyer’s Vision for Messiah College

John Fea   |  February 13, 2020

Ernest L. Boyer (1928-1995) is the most distinguished graduate of Messiah College and one of the most influential educators of the last century. He was a Brethren in Christ pastor, the chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY)...

Created and Called for Community: “Making Meaning” on the First Day of Class

John Fea   |  February 4, 2020

I am pretty old school when it comes to the first day of class.  As some of you remember from my post last week, this semester I am teaching Messiah College’s first-year course Created and Called for Community (CCC).  Yesterday...

Teaching this Semester

John Fea   |  January 31, 2020

This semester, for the first time in my eighteen-year career at Messiah College, I will not be teaching any history courses.  Instead, I will be teaching three sections of a required first-year seminar titled “Created and Called for Community.”  This...

Writers Talk Wendell Berry and Community

John Fea   |  October 10, 2019

This is a session on Berry and community at the recent Front Porch Republic conference.  It includes Jeff Bilbro, Eric Miller, and Jake Meador. Check out Eric Miller‘s talk beginning of the 27:40 mark: [vimeo 363324500 w=640 h=360] Front Porch...

The Collapse of America’s Social Infrastructure

John Fea   |  September 21, 2018

Our roads, bridges, and airports are crumbling, but so is our “social infrastructure”–libraries, schools, playgrounds, athletic fields, gardens, bookstores, diners, and barbershops.  Over at The Atlantic, New York University sociologist Eric Klineberg discusses the collapse of the places that build flourishing...

Digital Harrisburg at the 2018 AHA

John Fea   |  January 5, 2018

I just finished chairing a session at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association titled “Placing the American Community: Lessons from the Digital Harrisburg Project.” Here is the session abstract: In spring 2014, students and faculty from Messiah College...

W.H. Auden on Catholicism and Protestantism

John Fea   |  October 30, 2017

Here is another Protestant Reformation post.  This one is stolen from Alan Jacobs’s blog Snakes and Ladders.  What follows is a quote Jacobs posted today from Auden‘s review of Erik Erickson’s Young Man Luther: The Christian doctrine which Protestantism emphasizes is that...

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