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

“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