On this 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses... some of the best Anxious Bench writing on the subject of the Protestant Reformation. Read more
On this 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses... some of the best Anxious Bench writing on the subject of the Protestant Reformation. Read more
That many people can’t remember what the Protestant Reformation was all about might not please scholars. But at least it appears to be serving the cause of Christian unity. Read more
I recently posted on the question of Christian numbers around 200 AD. Since then, I have read a new book that is a significant contribution on the subject, namely Thomas A. Robinson, Who Were the First Christians: Dismantling the Urban Thesis (Oxford University Press, 2017). This blogpost offers some reactions to that book and its thesis. Most scholars of early Christianity agree that it was an overwhelmingly urban religion, and some major writers who have advanced numbers based on that... Read more
The 500th anniversary of the Reformation offers plenty of opportunity to commemorate, but also to consider the uses and misuses of history. In my 2014 book The Great and Holy War, I discussed the “last time around,” namely the 400-year commemoration of Luther’s Reformation in October 1917, at the height of the First World War. My fellow blogger Tal Howard has also discussed the various Luther commemorations in his Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism (Oxford University... Read more
More than a half-century ago, the great church historian Jaroslav Pelikan described the Reformation as a "tragic necessity." Read more
Reflections on evil and the Holocaust Read more
How should we remember the Protestant Reformation? Read more
Saints are not to be idolized, obviously, but nor are they supposed to be milked for their moral lessons. Read more
I recently discovered a new word that will be really useful for me in writing about Christian history. It describes an important and enduring category or type of belief that I have long known about, and in various historical eras, but for which I have never really had the ideal term. I was in conversation with the excellent and widely published scholar of religion, Linda Woodhead, who is based at Lancaster, in north-west England. In correspondence, she mentioned an early... Read more
Female “purity” was highly prized in Victorian Christianity, but a sexual double standard let men off the hook. Read more
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