The Relevance of Religious History for Today
“Christians are ousted wherever possible on campus,” complained Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru) founder Bill Bright a few years before his 2003 death. With some regularity universities make news for de-recognizing student campus ministries that require their leaders to adhere to certain religious criteria (most often a statement of faith). This, a number of high-profile [...]
Until recent decades at least, nearly all Americans have believed in an unchanging God, “the same yesterday, today and forever.” If God does not change, does God’s manner and rate of revelation change over time? Typically, those who have wrestled with the issue of canon in the history of American religion have made only crude [...]
Evil has seemed everywhere over the past several weeks. The Boston bombings. Gruesome murders of babies who survived failed abortions. The kidnappings, forced rapes, and forced miscarriages of the women in Cleveland. Sometimes I’ve found that my students — often steeped in relativism — have to be prodded to consider “evil.” The word has religious [...]
God reveals Godself… My ears pricked up during a recent sermon at a local Presbyterian church. I’ve heard “Godself” used by mainline ministers with some regularity since I went to seminary some dozen years ago, but I’m not used to it. I’ve long been fascinated by the liberal Protestant quest to neuter God. I sat [...]
There are certain columns those with an interest in the history and present of American Christianity should read. The Wall Street Journal‘s weekly Houses of Worship essay (see the recent pieces on Jackie Robinson and Robert Edwards). Our own Philip Jenkins’s essays at Real Clear Religion (see his recent column on the anniversaries of Waco [...]
Interfaith marriage is skyrocketing in contemporary America. A generation ago, around fifteen percent of Americans married outside their faith, which probably mostly meant Catholics marrying Protestants. Now, according to Naomi Schaefer Riley, the rate is forty-two percent. As Americans continue to delay marriage and drift away from their parents and religious upbringings during their young [...]
From Bev Shea’s NYT obituary: Though Mr. Shea was long a vital part of Mr. Graham’s work — Mr. Graham routinely insisted that without him he would have had no ministry — he retained a wry modesty about his role. “The people didn’t come to hear me,” Mr. Shea told The Charlotte Observer in 2009. [...]
About a decade ago, the historian David Chappell wrote a thoughtful book about religion and the civil rights movement, titled A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Among other ideas, Chappell presents the argument that the supporters of civil rights, ultimately, had religion on their side. In other words, while [...]
I recently reviewed David Swartz’s Moral Minority for Books & Culture. Swartz is a gifted writer, and his book was a pleasure to read. David’s history of the evangelical left is a pleasure to read (and it should be so even for those on the opposite side of the partisan divide). Most attractively, he crafts [...]
The furtherance and further enrichment of the medieval Christian heritage of music and art remains of the greatest legacies of the Lutheran wing of the Protestant Reformation. As Luther stated in the preface to the 1524 Wittenberg Hymnal, he was “not of the opinion that the gospel should destroy and blight all the arts, as [...]
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