Several of these blog entries are reflections of various aspects of the holocaust-studies tour. These essays are designed to provide the reader with specific information about various memorials and locations as well as a personal reflection of meaning associated with a location or feature of a memorial. Some blog entries will not be animated by the holocaust-studies tour.
Additionally, I recently completed a writing project overhauling a behavior and social sciences statistics textbook. Some selected sidebar essays that may be of interest to a more general audience have been extracted and placed in this section of the website.
2026 Holocaust Studies Tour, Day 1: Welcome to Berlin!
Well, the gang is all here! All-in-all, gathering them up from the airport and train stations was rather uneventful. Just one flight hiccup and one ICE train delay. Very thankful for that. It nice to finally be all together in Berlin after having met several times as a group in our pre-tour spring meetings. Let me say emphatically, the questions are already flowing. “Did I see a Nazi pin on the shirt of that guy who was panhandling?” “How do the Germans feel about people coming to their country to learn about the Holocaust?” “Is it just me or are
2026 Holocaust Studies Tour, Day 0
Well, I made it to Berlin around mid-day and had a pretty productive afternoon and evening. Namely, I re-familiarized myself with the surroundings – there are always new things going on, and then I went exploring. This year there are several new large (10 story +) buildings going up around Alexanderplatz – and the station itself is under construction. You can still reach the platform to use the station and you can still buy rail tickets, but all of the commercial businesses under the station are closed and empty. Quick and diverse foods will not be quite as quick and
Former Fellow Travelers: Willing to Check Back In?
Recently I’ve been deliberately setting aside time to step back and, with intention, reflect on life. And one of the parts of my life that I find myself focusing on are the Holocaust Studies tours. Over the years, I’ve bumped into former students or fellow travelers who often go out of their way and make it a point to let me know the value they have taken from this study abroad experience. I always find these spontaneous exchanges to be moving and encouraging. Furthermore, I often find the way students express the tour’s importance to them to be measured and
Holocaust Studies Tour, 2026 – Pre-trip Post
This year I’ll be taking 12 wonderful Asbury students as well as Asbury Student Life Resident Director, Liz Louden, to Germany and Poland. Much of the tour will follow the tried-n-true route of previous years. But I will also be looking up new memorials in Berlin (thanks in large part to my friend, Christian Marx) and visiting the Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin) permanent exhibits exploring the dubious role the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics played in terms of mainstreaming and implementing eugenics and racial hygiene policy across Germany. We’ll be staying in the
Post 2025 Tour – Day 3: The Warsaw Ghetto
Life, Suffering, and Faith in the Ghetto I was able to spend the last day of my visit to Germany and Poland touring the Warsaw Ghetto. Once again, my Aussie friend Damien was both taxi and tour guide. The only context I have to share is that there is so much more here than I thought. Below are some pics from just some of the places we checked out. One highlight, you ask? Well, there is so much we found to reflect upon (I will be processing this day for a long time), but maybe I would single out the
Post 2025 Tour – Day 2: Sobibor
Today Damien and I visited and toured Sobibor, a remote camp that sits at the border of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. It functioned for about 18 months and the estimates of the number murdered here varies wildly. Conservatively, 180,000 is most often cited. It, along with Treblinka, is the camp where the use of deception was most successfully and most extensively practiced. It is also the location of the most successful escape from an Operation Reinhard camp – this event being most likely instrumental in its closure just a few weeks later. Below are some pictures. Tomorrow I will explore