On a recent trip to Turkey and Greece, where I loved the churches, mosques, and museums we were able to tour, my daughter had a very different highlight for her trip: the feral cats found in abundant number everywhere we went. While these cats marked every stop on our trip (much to her delight), on Cyprus, these cats came with a fascinating story that overlapped with church history, much to my delight. According to legend, Helena, the mother of Constantine,... Read more
In my current project on the early 1890s, I have written a good deal about new religious ideas and movements, some of which were very influential. But religious issues, broadly defined, went far beyond the realm of heated discussion in parlors and seminaries, and contributed to making the years 1893-94 politically perilous, with serious threats of violence, and rip-roaring conspiracy theories. Time and again, anyone studying that era must be powerfully aware of the close parallels with the much better-known... Read more
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade three years ago today in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, both sides in the abortion fight expected the results to be momentous. Some pro-lifers jubilantly predicted that numerous unborn human lives would be saved, while some abortion rights advocates envisioned a dark future in which women across much of the United States would be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or would seek out illegal abortion providers. Other... Read more
Apparently, the 12-day War is ending, all thanks to Trump’s God-gilded realpolitik. What do I mean by this? Allow me to show you by recounting recent geopolitical events that demonstrate how Trump has ushered in a new era of God-gilded realpolitik. At 5PM on Monday, June 23 President Trump announced the end to what he has dubbed “the 12-Day War.” His announcement on Truth Social states: CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE! It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran... Read more
If you pay any attention to Southern Baptist media surrounding the SBC’s annual conventions, you won’t have to wait too long to hear calls from denominational leaders to “keep the main thing the main thing,” that is, keep the focus on Southern Baptist mission work and evangelism. In what has almost become a liturgical tradition, Southern Baptist presidents, seminary presidents, entity heads, and influencers will call for unity amid all the controversy and political tension that threatens Southern Baptist cooperation.... Read more
A current project of mine focuses on the year of 1893 as a critical turning point in American culture and thought, and especially in religion. I am not of course suggesting that everything started on January 1 that year, but the chronology does serve as useful focus for understanding some quite revolutionary changes that were then in progress. Today I will discuss a movement that is forgotten except by specialists, but at the time it was phenomenally important and widely... Read more
“All hail to the Printing Press and all its beautiful adjuncts, and all hail to the coming Grapho-Tele-Phone and Photo-Telegraph, the Speech-Recorder and Transmitter, and the Picture-Producer! We hope that Zion City will yet produce that glorious combination.” J. Alexander Dowie, Leaves of Healing, August 31, 1901. Sitting in his office forty miles north of Chicago, John Alexander Dowie envisioned a bright future for his growing urban experiment: Zion City. His soaring rhetoric, however, betrayed the realities on the ground.... Read more
Moral failings in the church are not a new phenomenon—to read the pages of Christian history is to see sin’s stain throughout. The writings of the New Testament itself acknowledge this reality, exhorting Christians “to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self…” (Ephesians 4:22-24, NRSV). But the exhortations didn’t always work, and church discipline... Read more
“To go on pilgrimage is not simply to visit a place to admire its treasures of nature, art or history. To go on pilgrimage really means to step out of ourselves in order to encounter God where he has revealed himself, where his grace has shone with particular splendour and produced rich fruits of conversion and holiness among those who believe.” – From the Address of the Holy Father Benedict XVI on November 6, 2010 during his Apostolic Journey to... Read more
My recent blogs have focused on the year 1893, which I believe marked multiple critical landmarks in American history – social, cultural, and above all religious. Some of those events are famous and well studied, such as the World Parliament of Religions held that year in Chicago, but other developments are not well known, even to specialists. Today I will talk about a very important study of Native American spirituality that appeared in that year, one that almost surreptitiously offered... Read more
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