The Blue Collar Scholar

This sermon draws on the story of King David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem to illustrate four lessons for Christians today.

The European Theater of World War II will be our focus on the podcast for the next few months. (In the Spring, we will shift the focus to the Pacific Theater.) For the Nazis, the earliest stages of the Second World War was a series of successes. After their six-week conquest of France - the strongest of the Allies in World War I, and the nation Germany wasn't able to conquer in four years in the trenches of WWI - the Nazis could boast about their conquests of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Thanks to their non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Germany stood as the lone continental power, with everyone else conquered, an ally, or decidedly neutral. Only the United Kingdom stood between Hitler and absolute victory.

This episode briefly explores the Paris Peace Conference, Prohibition, the Roaring '20s, technological advances after WWI, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria & China, and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

In this podcast episode, we will take a criminally-brief dive into World War 1, why it started, who were the major belligerents, and how WWI set the stage for WWII.

This short episode of The Blue Collar Scholar is a book review and enthusiastic recommendation to read or listen to "Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South" by Stephanie McCurry.

This episode kicks off a new class for Spring 2023: The World Wars. The first episode quickly summarizes all the wars and industrialization that helped form the great belligerent nations of the First & Second World War, namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Tsarist Russia (and the USSR), Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, China, & Japan.

This podcast episode will conclude the lessons for the Fall 2022 New Testament class. This episode is a survey of New Testament theology, examining the Doctrine of Man, the Doctrine of the Church, and Eschatology (the study of the End Times).

We will close out the New Testament class with a few lessons on New Testament Theology. First up, we will discuss monotheism and the Trinity.

This episode will cover the class notes of the last three class periods for the New Testament class. In this episode, we will briefly discuss how the original manuscripts of the New Testament were transmitted through time to us today. We will also take a look at translation philosophies of English translations and discuss the value of a few of them.

The second half of the podcast will deal with the King James Version of the Holy Bible. We will look at the history of early English translations, the reasons why James I called the Hampton Court Conference to produce what would become the KJV, and take a look at the KJV-Only controversy.

As a time-saving measure, I will be switching formats for the rest of the semester. Instead of sharing classroom audio, these episodes will use the same notes that I use to teach, but it will be a podcast format instead of classroom audio.

This episode digs into the question of the "canon," the authoritative list that is our New Testament. How did these 27 books and no others make the cut?