I am several months late on this topic, but bear with me. Robert Eggers’s film The Witch is now available on DVD, and I finally got the chance to see it. It is one of the truly great horror films, no argument, but it is also an astonishing piece of historical reconstruction. The Witch is set in 1630s New England, and there is a great Telegraph review here. Approaching it, I speak as a long-standing aficionado of horror films, literally... Read more
I am presently writing something that draws heavily on the Old Testament sources. I am also struggling mightily with exactly how to refer to that book. Jews call it the Bible, while Christians speak of the Old Testament. Jews, naturally and reasonably, dislike the latter term because it suggests that their scriptures are outmoded or surpassed, and many modern Christians respect these sensitivities by themselves adopting the term “Hebrew Bible” or “Hebrew Scriptures,” or even the Jewish Scriptures. But by... Read more
“How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?” In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul dismissed skeptics of the bodily resurrection as fools, but the topic remained thorny among Christians for centuries. What was the difference between what Paul termed “celestial bodies” and “bodies terrestrial?” Paul made some clear distinctions. The earthly body was perishable. The resurrected body was imperishable. It would be a major transformation: “the corruptible must put on incorruption, and this... Read more
Many evangelicals became deeply disillusioned with Carter’s presidency. The sharp decline in ticket-splitting from 1976 to 1980—that is, voting for Carter at the top of the ticket and then for Republicans elsewhere on their ballots—suggested that support for Carter in 1976 was in fact an anomaly rooted in evangelical identity. What happened between 1976 and 1980 that flipped evangelicals away from Carter? First, many evangelicals reshuffled their priorities. In the mid-1970s the SBC had adopted resolutions supporting many of Carter’s... Read more
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” would make it on my list of must-reads for American cultural literacy. Written as he awaited release from a Birmingham, Alabama jail in 1963, King explained why the non-violent protests couldn’t “wait” any longer, as some moderate white Christians asked him to do. “When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro,” King wrote, “living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what... Read more
In my last column, I mentioned the New Thought movement of the early twentieth century, less for its own intrinsic significance, than for the astonishing importance that observers attached to it. Many educated people saw it as the coming world religion, most notably William James. Today, there is a more basic question: what on earth was it? The story begins with the Mind Cure movements of nineteenth century New England, which had their best known representative in Mary Baker Eddy... Read more
Yes, it did. But not the way you were taught in Sunday School. Let me explain. As I established in my previous post, vernacular translations of the Bible existed in England long before the Reformation. Moreover, they were used by clergy and laity alike. I venture that many late medieval English folk were just as well versed in scripture as many of their Reformation counterparts (although it is certainly true that the sections of scripture they knew would have... Read more
The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was the most provocative Patriot action before the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775. Most Americans vaguely know that the Tea Partiers pitched tea into Boston Harbor, because they were angry about taxes. But what actually provoked the Tea Party? The key instigator was Samuel Adams, a devout Christian. Should Christians look back on the Tea Party as a courageous act, or an unwarranted, if understandable, overreaction? The crisis that led to the... Read more
“The whole of sacred doctrine consists of two parts,” wrote John Calvin at the outset of his 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion, “knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Likewise, in his expanded 1559 edition of the Institutes, Calvin repeated that human wisdom “consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Calvin’s opening paragraph in his final edition of the Institutes is beautiful. Even a quick survey of human endowments should convince us that they... Read more
I wrote last time about the failings of prophecy in predicting religious futures. Here is a case-study. In his day, Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946) was an enormously respected writer and journalist, and a highly intelligent observer of American life. He was a mainstay of the muckraking movement and a leading Progressive, who was close to Woodrow Wilson. His 1908 book Following the Color Line was a pioneering exploration of American racial conditions. In 1910, he published a survey of contemporary... Read more
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