EGYPT’S FAITH

Last updated on: July 6, 2013 at 10:38 am By Philip Jenkins

It’s grim to watch recent developments in Egypt, as the nation’s Coptic Christians face growing threats. Not that Egypt’s long-suffering Muslim majority does not deserve full sympathy and respect, but the Copts stand in a very special place in the Christian story. So central are they, in fact, that I sometimes fantasize about writing a History of Christianity from the Egyptian perspective. Without Egypt, we would miss so many critical turning points in the making of the Christian faith. My... Read more

Cold, Tired, and Single in Zion

Last updated on: July 25, 2013 at 10:10 am By johnturner

One of my favorite things about spending several summers in Utah was enjoying an extra holiday on July 24th, commemorating the 1847 pioneer trek from the Missouri River to the Salt Lake Valley. For my family, Pioneer Day meant the Pioneer Day Classic road race in Provo, which loops around the Provo Temple (and, unlike many races, welcomes jogging strollers), various children’s activities at Provo’s North Park, and spending the rest of the day recovering from the race. Stifled by... Read more

How to Roast a Saint

Last updated on: July 23, 2013 at 3:51 pm By David Swartz

As the retirement gala for Ron Sider, the founder and president of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) for the last forty years, got underway last weekend, emcee Tony Campolo lamented the difficulty of the task at hand. “How do you roast a peace-loving, simple-living Mennonite?” he asked. There just isn’t a lot of material. A long list of luminaries—including Wes Granberg-Michaelson, Jim Wallis, Tom Sine, David Gushee, Dean Trulear, Rabbi David Saperstein, and Heidi Unruh—tried. And a few of them... Read more

The Strange Career of the Antimission Baptists

Last updated on: July 23, 2013 at 8:15 am By Thomas Kidd

I recently wrote about “Calvinism and the Roots of the Missionary Movement,” in which I discussed the powerful (and to some, counter-intuitive) influence of Calvinism on early Baptist missionaries. There’s a flip-side to that story, which is the largely Calvinist antimission movement of the 1820s and 1830s. Baptists and other evangelicals founded a number of missions-sending organizations in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, which precipitated a backlash among certain Baptists who opposed the work of the Baptist... Read more

Whither Luther?

Last updated on: July 21, 2013 at 6:23 pm By Agnes Howard

Hilary Sherratt, an alumnae of Gordon College and a guest blogger for this post, was a participant on Professor Tal Howard’s recent trip to sites of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. His own reflections on this trip appeared in an earlier blog, “The Incombustible Martin Luther.” Whither Martin Luther? Whither Christian Unity? – Ecumenical Purpose in 2017. Picture a coffee shop along the main street in Wittenberg, Germany, a group of Americans perched on seats in a back corner. We... Read more

THE ICON OF THE MAGDALENE

Last updated on: July 19, 2013 at 12:54 pm By Philip Jenkins

Grace Cathedral in San Francisco is one of my favorite religious structures in the US, and it is also home to a fine piece of modern spiritual art. In 1988, the Episcopal Church elected its first woman bishop, Barbara Harris, who was consecrated the following year (Harris is also African–American). To celebrate the event, the Cathedral commissioned an icon from Robert Lentz, who is presently a Franciscan friar. Partly because of his Eastern Christian religious background, Lentz has a deep... Read more

APPROVING REVELATION

Last updated on: July 18, 2013 at 8:53 am By Philip Jenkins

I have been writing about changing concepts of the Biblical canon, my point being that this has developed and altered substantially over time. Some core facts have been constant for a very long time, above all the church’s selection of four gospels – the four we know, and no other. Western Christians, though, might be surprised by just how flexible the canon has been in some ways, and in the New Testament as well as the Old. Most of the... Read more

The Jesus Movement

Last updated on: July 17, 2013 at 3:46 pm By johnturner

It’s hard not to like the Jesus Movement, but until recently, there wasn’t a good history of this revolutionary moment in the evolution of American evangelicalism. Now, there is. Larry Eskridge’s God’s Forever Family is a book you should read. I recently reviewed the book for Christianity Today. A number of years ago, I became interested in the Jesus Movement through Campus Crusade for Christ’s Explo ’72 evangelism and missions event in Dallas. CCC’s founder, Bill Bright, had been absolutely... Read more

The Long History of the Religious Right

Last updated on: August 31, 2019 at 2:56 pm By Miles Mullin

Ever since so many of them embraced the Reagan Revolution during the 1980 election cycle, the political involvement of evangelicals has garnered the attention of scholars and journalists. For many, the story of resurgent evangelical political involvement became one of backlash. Reacting against progressive politics and loosening social mores of the 1960s, evangelicals embraced a conservative political agenda in order to “save America.” In the late 1970s, this meant joining the Reagan Revolution in order to usher Jimmy Carter and... Read more

The Historical Genius of Edmund Morgan

Last updated on: July 18, 2013 at 10:30 am By Thomas Kidd

Last week we lost one of the titans of American history writing, Yale’s Edmund Morgan. His publishing career spanned an incredible sixty-five years from his first book (1944) to his last (2009). His topics ranged widely across colonial and Revolutionary American history, but if you have read anything by Morgan, it is likely The Puritan Dilemma, his biography of John Winthrop, still often used in history survey courses as a model of historical writing. An atheist, like his famous Harvard... Read more