George Campbell Morgan (born this day, December 9, in 1863) used to be more famous than he is now. Best known as the pastor of Westminster Chapel in London, he also worked in the United States with Dwight L. Moody’s many projects, and taught widely in Bible Institutes. One contemporary called him “the hardest working [...]

Today (December 8 ) is the anniversary of the death of Richard Baxter (1615–1691), the Puritan theologian who whose work The Reformed Pastor is a perennially useful classic on soul care, and whose Aphorisms on Justification caused controversy in his own time and consternation to this day. His popular 1650 book The Saint’s Everlasting Rest [...]

Today (December 6) is the day in 1273 when Thomas Aquinas stopped writing. He had certainly written plenty by then. He was not yet fifty years old, but had written about a hundred works: Commentaries on Scripture, collections of patristic commentaries, sermons, philosophical treatises, explorations of disputed subjects, commentaries on Aristotle and Proclus and Boethius, [...]

Today (December 5) is the birthday of Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Rossetti is remembered these days for the Christmas lyric “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the long, strange, poem Goblin Market which launched a thousand knowing dissertations, and charming, harmless children’s verse like “Hurt no living thing:Ladybird, nor butterfly.” But Rossetti also wrote a devotional commentary on [...]

Today (December 4) is the birthday of John Cotton (1585-1652), a Puritan pastor with a ministry in both Bostons: The Boston in Lincolnshire, England, and later the Boston in New England. He was an accomplished Cambridge University man (graduate of Trinity, fellow of Emmanuel) whose theological opinions were consistently moving in a more Puritan direction [...]

Today (December 2) is the anniversary of the death of Jan van Ruusbroec, also called John of Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), a 14th-century Flemish mystical writer whose work is often considered a high point of medieval Christian mysticism. In a 1984 lecture in Kentucky, Louis Dupre called him “Western Christianity’s most articulate interpreter of the trinitarian mystical [...]

Today (November 29) is the birthday of C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), the professor of English who just wanted to be left alone with his books and his handful of bookish friends. But he turned out to have a headful of exactly what the world needed: Christian faith that ran deep, that embraced the whole world [...]

Today (November 28) is the birthday of John Bunyan (1628-1688). Most famous for his Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan also authored a number of theological and devotional works of lasting value. They all have that Bunyan charm: The fluency with Scripture, the lightning-quick associative leaps, the natural vigor, the homespun power of the English language. If you [...]