An Interview with Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Author of The Men Who Lost America

Last updated on: March 21, 2014 at 11:16 am By Thomas Kidd

Today’s guest post is an interview with Dr. Andrew O’Shaughnessy, by David Moore. Dave blogs at www.twocities.org. Dr. Andrew O’Shaughnessy is vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. His book, The Men Who Lost America (Yale, 2013) has received number of awards, and is a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. Moore: It seems incredible that the British lost the Revolutionary War given their military superiority. Many have concluded that it must have been due to... Read more

THE WAY TO TRANSLATE

Last updated on: March 15, 2014 at 9:45 am By Philip Jenkins

For some years now, I have found it hard to read the New Testament in English alone. Now, don’t think I’m showing off there. My Greek is no better than OK, and a parallel text is really, really, useful. The problem is that, the more you read the text in the Greek original, you realize just how much you are missing in even the very best translations by the world’s greatest scholars. You miss all sorts of nuances and cross-references,... Read more

Visions in the Hebrew Scriptures

Last updated on: March 17, 2014 at 4:48 pm By johnturner

Beginning today, I’m starting a weekly series on visions. My immediate interest in the question stems from my recent foray into the history of Mormonism, a movement that now traces itself to Joseph Smith’s theophany of God the Father and Jesus Christ. (See this recent statement on the subject published last year by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Visions, theophanies and others, have a very long history in human religious experience, predating both Judaism and Christianity. In... Read more

The Strange Case of Two Stony Brook School Classmates

Last updated on: March 18, 2014 at 7:53 am By David Swartz

Several weeks ago I settled down to my usual Sunday afternoon reading of the New York Times. I encountered one of the more fascinating profiles I’ve read in a while. It opened like this: “One morning in late January, Jacques-André Istel woke up at his home in Felicity, Calif., did 100 push-ups and 125 squats, swam in his elegantly lit lap pool, then went back upstairs, where he took a light breakfast in bed, as has been his custom since... Read more

George Marsden and the Gift of Clear Writing

Last updated on: March 17, 2014 at 10:20 am By Thomas Kidd

Over at The Gospel Coalition, I recently reviewed The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief, by my doctoral advisor George Marsden. One of the things that I admire the most about Marsden as a history writer, which I see again in Twilight, is his clarity. (Wilfred McClay agrees, calling Twilight “sprightly and compulsively readable” in his Books & Culture review.) Even though he often writes on high-level intellectual history topics, Marsden’s work is universally lucid and accessible... Read more

Lenten Confessions: The App

Last updated on: March 16, 2014 at 5:45 pm By Thomas Albert Howard

It was bound to happen. As apps proliferate for all kinds of purposes, it was probably just a matter of time before one was invented to probe the recesses of conscience for sin. With version 1.0 appearing in 2011, “Confession: A Roman Catholic App” was released several months ago in its 2.0 version. 2.0 not only fixed past bugs and added new languages, but it also confronts the penitent with “MANY new sins in every examination.” (I’ll pass on the... Read more

EUROPE AND AFRICA

Last updated on: January 9, 2014 at 9:23 am By Philip Jenkins

Largely through the missionary efforts of the day, early modern Europeans had quite extensive awareness of a much wider world. I stress the religious context because even some of the political and diplomatic contacts with distant realms owed much to missionary efforts, with Jesuits much in prominence as intermediaries. Some recent art exhibits have provided important and surprising evidence for such interactions. I won’t describe them in detail, as you can easily find information on the Internet, but a couple... Read more

A WIDER WORLD

Last updated on: March 14, 2014 at 9:04 am By Philip Jenkins

I have been posting about how contemporary visual materials can be used to reflect the experience of Christian missionary history, with all its implications for globalization. Some of these materials are quite striking. For the Protestant world, the great age of missionary expansion only began at the end of the eighteenth century. The Catholic experience, of course, dated back much earlier. It can be startling to realize just how global the Christian world already was in the seventeenth century, particularly... Read more

The End of Religious Freedom?

Last updated on: March 13, 2014 at 10:02 am By johnturner

What is religious freedom? Is it the freedom to worship or otherwise interact with God, gods, or other things and entities as one sees fit? Is it freedom of conscience in terms of the supernatural? If religious freedom also involves the right to live out one’s religion in the public sphere, how far does that right extent? If religious freedom involves the right of churches (and like organizations) as well as individuals, to what extent do they operate independently of... Read more

Religious Marketplace, Religious Fragmentation

Last updated on: January 18, 2015 at 9:35 am By Miles Mullin

I am a big fan of religious disestablishment. I appreciate the tireless advocacy (and agitation) of my Baptist forbears for freedom of conscience in matters of religion. Over the decades, men such as Thomas Helwys, John Clarke, John Leland, Isaac Backus and the signers of historic Baptist confessions like the First London Confession (1644), The Standard Confession (1660), and The Philadelphia Confession (1742) have opposed state compulsion in matters of religion. As a minority movement, pragmatic concerns played a role,... Read more