From the Archive. Originally posted March 14, 2013. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. James 1:27[1] The global vision of American evangelicalism began in an improbable place, 1950s South Korea, as Americans encountered people like Pun Hui Pak. The youngest of four children, Pun Hui Pak was born in a small town outside Taegu, South Korea, in 1949. ... Read more
One of the most immediate differences from America one notices in the U.K. is how secularized the society is (especially compared to Texas!). Polls in Scotland suggest that even nominal adherence to Christianity, and Christian orthodoxy, is in massive decline. Although opinion data is often difficult to interpret with precision, the overall pattern seems clear. Recent surveys asked Scots “‘What religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to?’. In response, 42% of the adult population in Scotland said ‘None’.... Read more
Ever since my undergraduate years, I have been interested in early Christian history and Gnosticism. In the next few posts, I will talk about some of the things I have learned about Gnosticism, why it is so important, and some of the areas I am still trying to explore in my present book project. Here, I will just define my terms, and identify my main questions. Every history of early Christianity talks about Gnostics, who were so important between the... Read more
I posted on the topic of early Christian martyrdom, arguing that the phenomenon was as widespread as Christian writers claimed, and that it truly was driven by religious motives. That was especially true in the Persian Empire. One of the great church historians of antiquity was Sozomen, who was born near Gaza, in Palestine, around the year 400. His name, incidentally, translates roughly to “Being Saved,” in itself a concise statement of Christian faith. In his great Ecclesiastical History, Sozomen... Read more
Rome was not the only empire in antiquity, nor the only one with a sizable Christian population. I stress that repeatedly because of the number of times we read about Christian engagement with the secular world, which seems to be defined as the Roman Empire. In fact, the Persian Empire also had plenty of Christians, and any rounded account of Christian history needs to take them into account. Doing so can radically change our perceptions of that history. As a... Read more
Christians have no good reason to believe Jesus is coming soon. Okay, in the final chapter of John’s Apocalypse, Jesus himself says, “See, I am coming soon” (I prefer the King James Version’s “Behold, I come quickly”). But let’s face it, “soon” and “quickly” do not usually mean after two millennia. Indeed, a surface reading of the New Testament suggests that we need to approach Jesus’s statements about his imminent return with great caution. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus informs... Read more
In 1947 future Christianity Today editor Carl Henry wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. This rebuke of his heritage’s cultural isolationism helped jumpstart the neo-evangelical movement headlined by Billy Graham, Fuller Theological Seminary, and the National Association of Evangelicals. In 1955 John Howard Yoder, who went on to teach at what became Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, wrote of Mennonite participation in the NAE: “I don’t know just what the reason is; whether they think we have money, or are... Read more
Greetings friends! Writing here from beautiful and chilly St Andrews, Scotland, where we are spending the semester. I have just begun to write a new book on Ben Franklin and religion, and am discovering more and more what a thoroughly Calvinist background Franklin had. I have written before about his beloved Calvinist sister Jane. Today I will consider his father Josiah, a candle-maker and devoted member of Boston’s Old South Church. We normally associate Puritan immigrants to New England with... Read more
Carl Djerassi, the chemist and writer who died last week, was among the few men with claim to the title “father of the Pill.” Djerassi imagined how contraception and IVF could work together to change the world even more. His September 2014 essay in the New York Review of Books anticipated “The Divorce of Coitus from Reproduction,” speculating that in a few decades, people who could afford to keep the two apart would do so as a matter of course;... Read more
The 1940s witnessed a boom in esoteric and occult movements, and we so often encounter evidence for such movements that we realize just how familiar a part they must have been in the social landscape. We see this for instance in Wallace Stegner’s 1942 study of Utah, Mormon Country. Near Monticello, in one of the remotest corners of the state, Stegner discovered the “Home of Truth”, a communal Theosophical settlement first founded by Marie Ogden in 1933. She envisaged this... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In