S01:E03
He was born in Minnesota, raised in China, trained at a St. Louis seminary, and spent his life writing the history of Württembergers who left. Then he came back with an American army.
Karl John Richard Arndt is the man who secured Bad Boll. He is also the man in a photograph a reader in Württemberg sent me last week — the only likeness of him I have, captioned by his office and silent about everything else.
This episode is the rest of it. The boy who learned Mandarin in Hankow because his father had founded the Missouri Synod's mission there and would not come home. The seminary graduate who did not become a pastor, took a doctorate without ever holding a bachelor's degree, and made himself the historian of the Harmony Society — the Separatists who left Württemberg because the territorial church would not have them. And the man who was then sent to Stuttgart to decide what that same territorial church could and could not do.
Also: who else was born at Hankow while the elder Arndt was still there, and what he later became.
Written and researched by Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources, and notes at badbollbook.com.