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

The Anabaptist Judith

Last updated on: February 26, 2014 at 8:54 am By johnturner

Things were not going well in Münster (in present-day northwestern Germany) as of June 1534. The previous year, local Anabaptists, their ranks swollen by arrivals from the Netherlands and elsewhere, seized full control of the city. In February, a prophet named Jan Matthias had taken charge, whereupon Catholics and most Lutherans were stripped of their possessions and expelled from the city. That same month, Münster’s Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck began a protracted siege of the city. In April, on Easter... Read more

What to Publish, and When?

Last updated on: February 24, 2014 at 12:22 pm By Thomas Kidd

In response to one of my recent newsletters, a friend and former student asked, from the perspective of a Ph.D. student, “With seminar papers, conference papers, book reviews, and journal articles, there is a lot to think about. How to prioritize these? How to find time to work on long-term projects when the daily tasks of work press in?” [My newsletters only go to subscribers, if you haven’t signed up you can do so here.] I think these are questions... Read more

TERROR AND MASSACRE BEGAN

Last updated on: February 19, 2014 at 12:01 pm By Philip Jenkins

I have been writing recently about the methods by which a government really can destroy or eliminate a faith, no matter how strongly we believe that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” In particular, I described the extraordinarily efficient combination of terrorism and secret policing by which seventeenth century Japan destroyed the Catholic church. Catholic Europe had witnessed something similar in earlier centuries, with the Albigenisian or Cathar movement that had become so powerful in France... Read more

A PERIPHERAL VISION

Last updated on: February 20, 2014 at 3:56 pm By Philip Jenkins

In Catholic intellectual circles right now, the peripheral has become quite central. Since his term in office began, Pope Francis has turned often to the concept of the periphery, a term that for him has a rich assemblage of meanings. You can expect to hear the word surfacing repeatedly in religious discourse – and we are only beginning to understand how radical some of the implications might be. I have a special interest in this topic because much of my... Read more