Frankly Speaking

I'm teaching an Old Testament survey course this semester. We just began our exploration of the Israelite prophets of the 8th B.C. And t...

On Wednesday of this week, my "Introduction to World Religions" class went on a field trip to St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cathed...

Huang, Ray. 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Non-fiction book lo...

Ansary, Tamim. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes . New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. As Americans moved past the...

Stanley Kramer’s haunting film On the Beach takes place in the aftermath of a world-wide nuclear war. It is early 1964, and the superpowers...

In the previous two posts, I described the Berlin anti-Jewish riots of 1935. How to interpret such events from the past has been, and con...

The foregoing reports match up perfectly with dispatches issued during the spring and summer of 1935 by William E. Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to ...

The next three posts will present some of my research on the 1935 anti-Jewish riots in Berlin. These events represent only one of the countl...

"Orthodoxy: More Than an Empire (900-1700)" is the title of this chapter. Crises and Crusaders (900-1200) At the millennium, C...

This is the first chapter in Part V, which is titled, "Orthodoxy: The Imperial Faith (451-1800)". Like myself, most Westerners kno...

Theology, Heresy, Universities (1100-1300) The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the advent of universities in Christianized Europe. Few ...

"The West: Universal Emperor or Universal Pope? (900-1200)" is the title of this chapter. Abbots, Warriors and Popes: Cluny's ...