WARS OF RELIGION?

Last updated on: October 23, 2013 at 1:54 pm By Philip Jenkins

What are religious wars really about? I’ve been posting recently about the relationship between war and religious history, chiefly in the context of how warfare can shape religious change. Sooner or later, though, we encounter the familiar argument about what motivated a given cause, what drove a particular side in a war that they claimed as religious in nature. Modern observers are deeply skeptical about such claims, even in conflicts that contemporaries had absolutely no doubt were matters of faith,... Read more

REFORMATIONS THEN AND NOW

Last updated on: November 7, 2013 at 7:49 am By Philip Jenkins

I have been thinking recently about parallels between the Reformation and the rise of contemporary Global Christianity. Next week, I am involved in a conference being held at Gordon College (November 14-16), on Protestantism? Reflections in Advance of the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, 1517-2017. My paper bears the title “What hath Wittenberg to do with Lagos? Sixteenth-Century Protestantism and ‘Global South’ Christianity.” Separately, I have also been working on Christianity in Ethiopia, where the past forty years or... Read more

The Book of Mormon in 15 (or so) Days

Last updated on: November 7, 2013 at 7:01 pm By johnturner

I’m re-posting the below, which originally appeared in two separate segments at Religion in American History: After years of studying the history of Mormonism, I finally resolved to read the tradition’s founding scripture in short order: the Book of Mormon in fifteen days. Because of its large print and easy-to-read format (I’m not quite as old as that makes me sound), I chose Royal Skousen’s The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale, 2009) for the task. I’ve also kept... Read more

The Expansion of Evangelicalism

Last updated on: January 18, 2015 at 10:33 am By Miles Mullin

This past week, I re-familiarized myself with John Wolffe’s The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers, and Finney (2006) while preparing a lecture on evangelicalism for my Survey of Church History course (which I wrote about here). Sequentially second in IVP’s History of Evangelicalism series, Wolffe’s volume spans the 1790s to the 1840s, a period in which evangelical social efforts were pronounced. As a result, the volume emphasizes “society and politics” rather than “theology and culture (21).” Since I am... Read more

Why I Am Still a Baptist

Last updated on: November 5, 2013 at 9:17 am By Thomas Kidd

A reader recently asked me why, given my knowledge of and interest in church history, I remain a Baptist. There are powerful arguments for apostolic succession, infant baptism, and other non-Baptist principles that other low-church evangelicals have found compelling. Why do I stick around? It may help to know that I did not grow up in the Baptist tradition, so my commitment to it does not come with the “baggage” that I know some feel about the church of their... Read more

WAR AND GOD’S KINGDOM

Last updated on: October 21, 2013 at 12:46 pm By Philip Jenkins

Wars often change and reshape religions. I have posted recently, for instance, on how the chaos of war can stir apocalyptic expectations and fears, and spawn new religious movements. War can also have a powerful effect on theology, on how they see the church’s role. Historically, churches have repeatedly discredited themselves by their uncritical acceptance of official state positions, especially when later events have shown the hollowness of those political beliefs. Now, historians often exaggerate the speed of these effects,... Read more

WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS

Last updated on: November 3, 2013 at 6:29 am By Philip Jenkins

I posted recently about how wars shape religious change. Depending on the particular circumstances, wartime conditions can have an enormous impact on religious movements and revivals. Let’s look particularly at the Early Modern period. Wars can have good or bad results for states, but for ordinary people, they are drastic and usually horrible transitions in life. In some cases, they can bring massacre, rape and looting to a previously tranquil area. Even if that does not happen, young men are... Read more

FAITH AT WAR

Last updated on: November 1, 2013 at 7:55 am By Philip Jenkins

I have been thinking how warfare drives religious change. This arises partly from preparing the graduate course I am teaching at Baylor University in the coming Spring semester on Global Christianity, where of course I am tracing the fates of different churches and missions over lengthy periods of time. Also, the new book I have coming out next year presents the case for the First World War as a worldwide religious revolution. This is The Great and Holy War, to... Read more

Evangelical-Mormon “Detente”?

Last updated on: October 31, 2013 at 7:20 am By Thomas Kidd

Adelle Banks of Religion News Service has a fascinating piece on signs of a possible new evangelical-Mormon detente, a thaw that goes even beyond the widespread evangelical support for Mitt Romney as president. She writes Last month, after being sure to get his caffeine fix at Starbucks, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land went where few evangelicals had dared to go before: the campus of Brigham Young University, the intellectual heart of Mormonism. After lecturing on “family, faith, freedom and America,”... Read more

Mixing the Market and the Common Good: Complicating the Individualist-Structuralist Binary

Last updated on: October 29, 2013 at 10:22 pm By David Swartz

In recent years scholars have accentuated the individualistic impulse within conservative evangelicalism. Evangelicals, Christian Smith and Michael Emerson pointed out in Divided By Faith, often understand racism as a long series of personal white-on-black abuses more than a practice built into economic, social, and cultural systems. Typically this impulse is contrasted with secular liberal attention to structural inequalities. This formulation has much utility, for evangelicals have retained a passion for individual souls and bodies. They see micro-enterprise programs as desirable... Read more