“Ask Jesus into Your Heart”: A History of the Sinner’s Prayer

Last updated on: March 7, 2014 at 10:50 am By Thomas Kidd

[This week’s post comes from my Patheos archives.] Many an evangelical pastor has concluded a sermon by asking non-Christians to “ask [or receive, or invite] Jesus into their heart,” or to pray a version of what some call the “sinner’s prayer.” But some evangelicals, including Baptist pastor David Platt of Birmingham, Alabama, have in recent years criticized the sinner’s prayer as unbiblical and superstitious. Surely, Platt argued in a controversial March 2012 sermon, there must be more to salvation than saying a... Read more

PAINTING FRANCIS XAVIER

Last updated on: January 8, 2014 at 9:29 pm By Philip Jenkins

I posted about the art of mission, the ways in which Euro-American Christians visualized the missionary efforts under way in Africa and Asia. Those pictures give a fine insight into the ideology of mission, helping us understand what believers in that age thought they were trying to accomplish. We find some superb examples of that process from images of the Jesuit St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552), who for centuries was regarded as perhaps the greatest of all missionaries. Most active in... Read more

THE ART OF MISSION

Last updated on: January 8, 2014 at 3:31 pm By Philip Jenkins

Visual art can be a terrific source for the history of religion, and that is especially true when we look at Christian missions through the centuries. Those visuals don’t just reflect our idea of a topic, they do much to shape it. For many people today, the word “missionary” is faintly ludicrous, and conjures up thoughts of sturdy Victorians in pith helmets, serving the cause of colonial exploitation. To see what I mean, just go to Google images and feed... Read more

American Pseudobibles (and the Book of Mormon)

Last updated on: February 27, 2014 at 5:53 pm By johnturner

Americans during the Revolutionary era and the Early Republic lived in a world suffused with the Hebrew scriptures. That reality, already charted by many historians (including Mark Noll, who once termed the Old Testament (“the common coinage of the realm”), is only the backdrop to Eran Shalev’s remarkable American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. Most expansively and simply, Shalev argues that “political Hebraism” led Americans — both those more and... Read more

Unexpected Sites of Christian Pacifism: Holiness Edition

Last updated on: March 4, 2014 at 10:34 pm By David Swartz

Jay Beaman, a sociologist at Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon, likes to do historical experiments. After extensive research he sends emails to members of Ancestry.com, telling them that he has found a relative of theirs who claimed religious objection on their World War I draft card. These relatives were members of holiness and Pentecostal denominations. Their descendants typically have no idea of the pacifist commitments of their grandparents and usually write back to Beaman saying that he surely must... Read more

Tocqueville’s Uncanny Vision

Last updated on: March 3, 2014 at 11:00 am By Thomas Kidd

Last week I had the privilege of leading my History of American Thought class at Baylor through Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. This is one of the most intriguing, and in some cases most chilling, analyses of the American republic ever written. Composed by the visiting French aristocrat in the 1830s, Democracy in America argued that America’s strength came from its religious heritage, its tradition of local participatory politics, and its many mediating institutions and civic associations, all standing... Read more

Thoughts on That Last Thin Mint

Last updated on: March 2, 2014 at 2:19 pm By Agnes Howard

This week closes Girl Scout cookie season in Massachusetts. (There are people out there who politely beg off buying a box with the excuse that they still have some of last year’s in the freezer: that’s just wrong.) The Girl Scouts have successfully avoided much of the controversy dogging the Boy Scouts, although they have have had some dust-ups with religious bodies—disapproval from Dr. James Dobson in 1994 for muting fidelity to God, 2012 concern from the U.S. Conference of... Read more

WELSH AMERICA, AMERICAN WALES

Last updated on: February 6, 2014 at 8:04 am By Philip Jenkins

I recently posted about the sizable and often under-appreciated presence of Welsh people in America. As with many immigrant groups, the relationship between home country and new land was complex and remarkably long-lived. Generally, people did not just up and move to America, immediately losing all interest in their older countries. For one thing, it was surprisingly common for migrants to America to return to their homelands, at least temporarily, bringing all sorts of new ideas with them. In the... Read more

WELSH ROOTS

Last updated on: February 14, 2014 at 3:17 pm By Philip Jenkins

March 1 marks St. David’s Day, the great national celebration for Welsh people throughout the world. Through the years, I have worked extensively on different aspects of Welsh history, including the Welsh in America. That American heritage is in fact very substantial, especially in the religious arena, although few Americans seem to appreciate it. The problem is that Welsh migrants arrived gradually, in multiple waves from the seventeenth century onwards, and they lacked the obvious markers that delayed the assimilation... Read more

Birmingham Revolution

Last updated on: January 18, 2015 at 9:38 am By Miles Mullin

For the February 2014 Patheos Book Club With the publication of Birmingham Revolutionon the occasion of the Birmingham Campaign’s fiftieth anniversary last year, IVP Books provided a readable, well-informed, and smartly packaged work that can serve as either an introduction to those unfamiliar with the seminal events of spring 1963 or a refresher for those who need it. As in his first book, Reconciliation Blues, Edward Gilbreath’s writing is engaging and fluid, without being trite and simplistic. Published through IVP’s... Read more