The Relevance of Religious History for Today
Our church recently hosted a presentation by Owen Strachan, who teaches theology and church history at Boyce College in Louisville, Ky. Strachan is the co-author, with Douglas Sweeney (Strachan’s doctoral mentor), of the five-volume Essential Edwards Collection (2010). I happily came away from the session with a copy of one of these volumes, Jonathan Edwards on True Christianity. [...]
Matthew Bowman, writing at the Religion in American History Blog, has a fascinating piece on Stephen Covey, one of the leading motivational/self-improvement writers of the past generation. Covey, who recently passed away, was the author most famously of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Bowman: It is perhaps no coincidence that Covey’s interpretation of Mormon theology [...]
We now have a presidential ticket without at least one candidate who is nominally Protestant. The Daily Caller‘s Matt K. Lewis saw this coming a couple weeks ago, and interviewed me about the prospect. “I don’t think it [will] be particularly important in this election,” says Kidd … “Evangelicals would be heartened by the selection of [...]
The Anxious Bench’s John Turner has a New York Times editorial this weekend titled “Why Race Is Still a Problem for Mormons.” (Turner is the author of a new biography from Harvard University Press titled Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.) In the Times piece, Turner calls on Mormons to confront directly their church’s historic policies with regard to race, [...]
From Waco it takes about three and a half hours to get to Archer City, Texas, home of Larry McMurtry’s legendary Booked Up. This is my favorite used bookstore in America. Last weekend, McMurtry, the celebrated western novelist and author, most famously, of Lonesome Dove, auctioned off two-thirds of his inventory, mostly to aspiring used booksellers. [...]
What political legacy did the Puritans leave to America? There was a time when historians commonly portrayed the Puritans as America’s founding democrats. No one better articulated this view than Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in Democracy in America that Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute [...]
The National Parks may well be “America’s best idea” (goodness knows the government has had many worse ideas), and one of their best programs is the Junior Rangers. As homeschooling parents of young children, we have gone to many national parks and found that doing the Junior Ranger activities is just the trick for maintaining [...]
Here’s a popular post I wrote last year at Patheos: Patrick Henry, the greatest orator of the American Revolution, was homeschooled. Born in 1736 as the second of eleven children, he attended a small common school until he was 10. After that, his father took primary responsibility for his education. He read classics of Greek [...]
I recently reviewed Michael Winship’s Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill, and thought I would use the occasion to offer a list of 5 all-time great books on the Puritans in America. The Puritans have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, so there are lots of excellent books not included [...]
Many an evangelical pastor has concluded a sermon by asking non-Christians to “ask [or receive, or invite] Jesus into their heart,” or to pray some version of what some call the “sinner’s prayer.” But some evangelicals, including Baptist pastor David Platt of Birmingham, Alabama, have begun to criticize the sinner’s prayer as unbiblical and superstitious. Surely, [...]
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