Why We Teach

Last night Bethel hosted the premiere of Prof. Sam Mulberry’s documentary film, Why We Teach, featuring interviews with fifteen recipients of Bethel’s Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching (including Prof. Chris Gehrz). If you couldn’t be there, the full film is now available to stream:

Filmed and edited over the course of Prof. Mulberry’s spring sabbatical, Why We Teach is available at his CWC Radio Films website. In addition, there you’ll find the original faculty interviews and a searchable database of topical clips. For example, here’s Prof. Gehrz trying out some metaphors for teaching the liberal arts, including a moving story from HIS231L World War II that made the cut for the final draft of the film.

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Save the Date: The Premiere of Prof. Mulberry’s Sabbatical Film on Teaching at Bethel

While he’s technically on sabbatical from Bethel, Prof. Sam Mulberry has actually spent most of his spring thinking and talking about Bethel.

For his primary sabbatical project, Sam has been filming interviews with fifteen winners of the Bethel Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching — including 2009 recepient Chris Gehrz. (Sam won the excellence award for service this past August.)

Eventually, those interviews will be available in an online archive, but Sam has also edited them into a documentary film, Why We Teach. If you’d like to see the film’s premiere, come to CC 313 at 7pm on Wednesday, May 23rd. (Earlier that day, Sam will talk about the larger sabbatical project as part of our annual West by Midwest forum on innovation in teaching — 1:30pm in the Bethel Maker Space.)

Meanwhile, enjoy the trailer for Why We Teach, featuring Sara Shady (Philosophy), Dan Ritchie and Joey Horstman (English), Carole Young (Psychology), Ken Steinbach (Art), Leta Frazier (Communication Studies), and Dick Peterson (Physics).

Highlights from the 2018 Minnesota Undergraduate History Symposium

Over the weekend students and faculty from our department took part in the fifth annual Minnesota Undergraduate History Symposium (MUHS), joining peers from the University of Northwestern-St. Paul, Bethany Lutheran College, Martin Luther College, and our hosts, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.

Saint Mary’s was founded as a men’s academy in 1912 by the bishop of Winona

In 1933 the diocese sold Saint Mary’s to the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a teaching order founded in 1680 by St. John Baptist de La Salle

The symposium was held in the year-old Science and Learning Center

Six Bethel History majors presented their research at Saturday’s three concurrent sessions:

• Kerry Bloomfield, “Evangelical Marriage Manuals from 1970-1979”
• Andrew Fort, “The Quintessential American Cowboy”
• Hannah Harville, “The Christian Palestinian Experience with, Involvement in, and Response to the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict since the First Intifada”
• Nelson Menjivar, “Catalonia and Spain: Origins of a Nationalist Movement”
• Sarah Sauer, “The Moderating Role of Virtus Romana in Augustine’s Desacralization of Nature”
• Matt Velasco, “The Development and Impact of the Confessing Church”

(Most of these students are currently taking HIS499 Senior Seminar and will be giving more final versions of their research papers on Monday, May 21, 6pm, CLC 109. All are invited!)

Faculty members Amy Poppinga, AnneMarie Kooistra, and Chris Gehrz moderated panels during the symposium, and Prof. Poppinga spoke on the closing faculty roundtable (“Students’ Religious Literacy in a Pluralistic Society”).

Prof. Poppinga speaking at the closing session, where she was joined by Saint Mary’s professor Erich Lippman

From left to right: front row – Matt Velasco ’18, Andrew Fort ’18, Prof. AnneMarie Kooistra, Prof. Amy Poppinga; back row – Nelson Menjivar ’19, Hannah Harville ’19, Kerry Bloomfield ’19, Prof. Chris Gehrz

(If you’d like to see some highlights from various sessions, Prof. Gehrz live-tweeted the symposium at the hashtag #MUHS2018.)

Thanks to Dr. Tycho de Boer and the rest of our hosts from Saint Mary’s for putting on a fine symposium. We’re looking forward to having MUHS return to Bethel next year.

Nelson Menjivar Named to INCE Museum Fellows Program

Nelson Menjivar ’19, a Bethel History major and Philosophy minor, was named to the 2018-2019 cohort of the INCE Museum Fellows at the Minnesota Historical Society. The program includes a fall course at MNHS, a site visit to museums in Chicago, a paid internship next spring, and ongoing mentoring after the program concludes.

In addition to letting students explore museum-related careers, the INCE program

is designed to engage students in studying the challenges related to the underrepresentation of communities of color and American Indian Nations in historical organizations and public history graduate programs. Communities need to “see themselves” in the work of cultural organizations in order to identify with their missions.

A native of West Saint Paul, MN, Nelson currently serves as a teaching assistant with Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture program. He says that he was particularly excited about the INCE program because it offered “the chance to work with museums and professionals who not only study history, but also find a way to present it to the public… I’m excited to get the internship started and use the valuable tools I’ve picked up at the Bethel History department!”

Congratulations, Nelson!

Giving a Cup of Cold Water in Christ’s Name

Join Prof. Magnuson and the other Friends of The History Center for their spring event on Saturday, April 21 at Calvary Church in Roseville. After coffee and refreshments at 9:30am, the program will begin at 10am.

This year’s featured speaker is Ron Dischinger, retired CEO/president of the Elim Park Baptist Home in Cheshire, Connecticut (and former Bethel History student — find him on our alumni map). In addition to his nearly four decades at Elim Park, Ron served at the Klingberg Children’s Home. Both institutions are rooted in the historic social ministry of the Baptist General Conference (now known as Converge). (Learn more about Klingberg in the May 2008 issue of The Baptist Pietist Clarion.) In his talk, Ron will trace some of that history, plus the program will feature some creative social ministries being carried out by Converge churches in the Twin Cities. And guests are invited to stop by the oral history table to share their own story of social ministry.

The program is free, but attendees are encouraged to register online and bring a food item to donate.

Get a Preview of Prof. Gehrz’s New Project on Charles Lindbergh

Join us next Thursday (April 12, 11:15am) in the Bethel University Library as Prof. Gehrz gives a Not Ready for Prime Time talk previewing his new project: a “spiritual, but not religious” biography of the famous aviator Charles A. Lindbergh.

Lindbergh died in 1974 in Hawaii and was buried on the grounds of a Congregationalist church. His gravestone quotes Psalm 139: “…if I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea…” – Wikimedia

If you can’t make it, you can find video of that talk — and our professors’ and students’ many other appearances in the Library — at our YouTube channel. Or read some of Prof. Gehrz’s recent Lindbergh posts at The Pietist Schoolman and The Anxious Bench:

• “The Bishop’s Boys: Religion and the Wright Brothers“
• “Christian Responses to Lindbergh: ‘The New Christ’“
• “Christian Responses to Lindbergh: ‘The Recrudescence of Paganism’“
• “The Lindberghs of Little Falls“
• “The Spiritual Spirit of St. Louis“
• “The Winged Gospel: When Aviation Was a Religion“

Prof. Poppinga on Teaching and Interfaith Engagement

Prof. Amy Poppinga recently published an article with Interfaith Youth Core’s INTER site. It starts with her taking Bethel students to a local mosque to observe worship and then share a meal. While the evening provoked some difficult conversation about theological differences, she found that the awkwardness actually led to considerable learning among her students:

There was agreement that the last hour of the evening had, indeed, been uncomfortable. While they were certainly taking that discomfort seriously, a few days of distance allowed them to laugh about the awkwardness of the encounter and consider it from different angles.

Students spoke about the need to not be defensive but rather to be okay with operating from a posture of learning. One commented that he could only imagine what it would be like to have the tables turned, and to be a Muslim listening to a Christian defend their theology in contrast to Islam. “I’m sure that happens a whole lot more often than what happened to us,” he remarked. A few students then began to discuss their own struggles with aspects of Christian theology, and an almost confessional atmosphere was created as some expressed the difficulty of articulating faith and truth claims.

Read the full article here.

Student Presentation on Living in Uganda

Please join us next Thursday (March 29th, 11:15am) in the Bethel University Library for a presentation by junior Social Studies Education major Rachel Land, “Uganda: Learning to Live, Love, and Find a Home Outside My Comfort Zone.”

Part of the Global Perspectives of Students series sponsored by the Office of Off-Campus Studies, Rachel’s presentation will cover her experience in Uganda and Rwanda, and “address the changes she experienced in her faith and worldview, her new-found understanding of community, her experience with reverse culture shock, and many other aspects of her time abroad.”

Learn More about Our January 2019 World War I Trip to Europe

Interim 2018 is barely in our rear view mirror, but it’s time to start thinking about January 2019… when Prof. Mulberry and I will take our fourth group of Bethel students to Europe for the travel course HIS230L World War I!

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Here’s the course description:

An experiential study of the history of the First World War built around travel in England, Belgium, France, and Germany, including visits to battlefield sites, cemeteries, memorials, and museums. Students will learn what it was like to experience and remember total war and to appreciate this particular conflict’s larger significance for American and European culture.

The itinerary is still taking shape, but will roughly follow this schedule:

• Depart MSP: Dec. 31, 2018
• Stay in London (with a day trip to Oxford): Jan. 1-8
• Battlefield tour of the Western Front and Normandy: Jan. 9-12
• Stay in Paris (with a day trip to Versailles): Jan. 13-15
• Stay in Munich (with a day trip to Dachau): Jan. 16-20
• Return to MSP: Jan. 21, 2019

Yes, this year we’re cutting a day out of our stay in Paris in order to extend the battlefield tour to include some sites from the Second World War. It’s a topic we’ve always touched on — especially during our last leg in Munich — but wanted to expand a bit as we mark the 100th anniversary of the peace conference that ended WWI and started the clock ticking on WWII. (It’s also a chance to preview my actual WWII class — HIS231L — next offered in Spring 2019. On campus, that is.)

Current students: if you’re interested in joining the trip, here’s how you can learn more.

• Find our course page on the new Bethel Study Abroad website
• Stop by our booth at the annual Interim Abroad Fair: Wednesday, March 28, 11am-2pm in the BC Atrium.
• Attend our first informational session: Tuesday, April 10, 11:15am-noon in CLC 109.

And you can read reflections from students on the 2017, 2015, and 2013 trips here at AC 2nd.

Interfaith Storytelling for a Vibrant Democracy

Congratulations to Prof. Amy Poppinga on the success of last month’s undergraduate leadership conference: Interfaith Storytelling for a Vibrant Democracy, which sought to help college students address inter- and intra-religious rifts in American society by “equipping ourselves to tell our own stories and learn to listen to the stories of others with clarity, charity, and hospitality.”

Along with her Bethel colleagues Sara Shady (Philosophy) and Marion Larson (English), Prof. Poppinga helped coordinate the event, which drew about 80 students (15 from Bethel) to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. (Bethel and St. Thomas co-sponsored the event with Augsburg University.) The conference was the latest in a series of interfaith collaborations for the three Bethel professors — and an extension of themes from Prof. Poppinga’s research and teaching (in courses like HIS212U History of Islam, HIS328G Muslim Women in History, and HIS356 Modern Middle East). In addition to coordinating, Prof. Poppinga led a breakout session on Moving into One Another’s Stories.

“Because the conference was workshop-based, students were engaging with peers, not just listening to experts,” she told Bethel News. “They had the opportunity to connect shared experiences, concerns, commonalities, despite coming from multiple campuses.”

The conference was funded by a grant from Interfaith Youth Core, whose president, Eboo Patel, will speak at Bethel on Monday morning, April 9.