Day: February 18, 2023

Pennsylvania Religious History

I have been publishing on Pennsylvania history for forty-plus years. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time working on very local religious history, in Central Pennsylvania, and produced several blogposts on it. They are collected in the document that follows. I think it makes some useful points about how we “read” a historic landscape,…Continue Reading Pennsylvania Religious History

Occult City: A Book That Never Happened

I offer the following in what we might call the spirit of intellectual archaeology. Back in 2003, when velociraptors roamed the Earth, I had what I thought was a bright idea for a book project titled Occult City: Alternative Spiritualities in an American Metropolis, 1880-1940, the city in question being Philadelphia. That seemed sensible because…Continue Reading Occult City: A Book That Never Happened

Debating the Book of Mormon

Back in 2015, I was involved in a lively debate with the now sadly deceased Professor Bill Hamblin over the historicity of the Book of Mormon, a controversy that attracted quite a bit of attention. For that reason, I assembled what I believe to be a complete record of the (rather numerous) contributions to that…Continue Reading Debating the Book of Mormon

My Penn State Teaching

From 1980 through 2011, I taught at Penn State, and in a variety of departments. Originally I was based in Administration of Justice, but I also taught in American Studies, before focusing chiefly on Religious Studies and History, which is where I spent most of my years. (The two units were combined administratively). Through that…Continue Reading My Penn State Teaching

Unpublished Papers and Articles

These are several papers or articles by me that are “in development” to varying degrees, or which for various reasons are not easily available in print. Several were conference papers. In some cases, I have absorbed the material into some other work such as a published book, but in other instances the papers remain “orphans.”…Continue Reading Unpublished Papers and Articles

Late Roman and Sub-Roman Materials

  I have a really long standing interest in British and Irish history during what some (controversially) still call the Dark Ages. I would actually defend that term, although we more correctly speak of post-Roman and Early Medieval periods. Partly this was a question of my growing up in South Wales, but I was also…Continue Reading Late Roman and Sub-Roman Materials

Baylor Teaching Materials

Here are several of the syllabuses for courses I have taught at Baylor over the past decade or so. These include courses on Global/World Christianity, and on Late Modern US History, since 1975 or so. I also include a collection of blog posts I have written over the years on approaches to teaching, writing, and…Continue Reading Baylor Teaching Materials