SAINT JOHN FISHER

Last updated on: June 21, 2013 at 11:24 am By Philip Jenkins

Often, stories of martyrs and saints are so reworked over time that they become outrageously improbable, and it becomes all but impossible to excavate to find what really happened. That’s doubly unfortunate, because some unquestionably genuine stories are so powerful in their own right that they need not the slightest additional coloring. As a case in point, I offer the story of English saint John Fisher, the legendarily holy Bishop of Rochester under Henry VIII. He was also a noted... Read more

Penance in a White Sheet

Last updated on: June 19, 2013 at 12:16 pm By johnturner

While rereading Edmund Morgan’s magisterial American Slavery, American Freedom, I was struck by his discussion of public penance performed by early Virginian fornicators and adulterers: The courts, for example, prescribed penances for couples who appeared with children too soon after marriage, requiring them to appear at church the next Sunday dressed in white robes and carrying white wands. As in England, they prescribed whipping for the unmarried woman who produced a child, while her lover usually got off with doing... Read more

The Historian’s Vocation in the Age of Information, Part 1*

Last updated on: June 19, 2013 at 10:51 am By Miles Mullin

Over the past two decades, the exponential advance of information-sharing and communication-oriented technology transformed and continues to transform everything from recipe-sharing to research. Since 1990, when I first entered the academic world, portable data storage technology evolved from state-of-the-art 5.25 inch, “high density” floppydisks, which stored 360 KB of data, to flash-drives the size of a tube of lip balm that can hold 128 GB of data. E-communication advanced from a green-font, UNIX-based e-mail system to the plethora of options... Read more

The NSA Controversy, the Founding Fathers, and the Fourth Amendment

Last updated on: June 18, 2013 at 8:42 am By Thomas Kidd

My latest post for The Federalist Papers reflects on the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and requires that warrants be justified by “probable cause.” What was the historical context of the Fourth Amendment, and why were the Founders so concerned about what they called “general warrants”? More urgently, what can the background to the Fourth Amendment tell us about the NSA controversy? From the article: Fears about the pervasive reach of our... Read more

THE OTHER OLD TESTAMENT

Last updated on: June 11, 2013 at 8:08 am By Philip Jenkins

Throughout their history, Christians have used the Old Testament as well as the New. But their Old Testament references often derived from a much wider body of texts that we know under that name. Apart from the canonical books, many other works circulated purporting to expand on the stories found in the Hebrew Bible, and often under the name of venerated prophets or sages. Unless we appreciate the volume and influence and such texts, it is often hard to understand... Read more

THE GREAT BIBLES

Last updated on: June 16, 2013 at 6:04 am By Philip Jenkins

Any history of the New Testament text makes extensive use of the magnificent fourth century Greek Bibles, the “uncial codices.” We know the three greatest as Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus. These were splendid deluxe volumes intended for major churches, intended to be accessible to the Empire’s new Christian elites. They thus give an excellent idea of just what the Bible looked like like during the decades following the Roman Empire’s acceptance of Christianity. Modern readers though might be surprised at... Read more

A WOMAN’S HAND

Last updated on: June 11, 2013 at 8:50 am By Philip Jenkins

As I recently noted, the book of Judith is not part of the Hebrew Tanakh or of Protestant Bibles, but it is recognized as canonical in other churches, especially the Catholic and Orthodox. I do understand the reasons why Protestants made the decision they did to relegate the book to the Apocrypha, although its subsequent disappearance from the Bible as such is unfortunate. Judith does repay reading, not least for the theme of the weak overthrowing the arrogant and seemingly... Read more

A Model of Christian Charity

Last updated on: June 12, 2013 at 11:43 pm By johnturner

Nearly every semester, I have the occasion to ask at least one class of students to read John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “Christian Charity, a Modell Hereof.” Most of my students have rather negative impressions of Puritanism, which in their minds probably equals religious intolerance and the execution of teenaged witches. I don’t assign them Winthrop to change their minds, but I do find that Winthrop’s sermon provides at least a rather attractive window into the Puritan mindset even for those... Read more

The Spirit of (Personal) Development

Last updated on: June 12, 2013 at 12:49 am By David Swartz

I post today from Los Angeles, where I’m spending the week at World Vision International headquarters doing research for my next project. To prepare for my trip, I read Erica Bornstein’s The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (2005). The book explores the work and theology of two large Christian development organizations: World Vision* and Christian Care. During the mid-1990s when Bornstein was doing field research in Africa, these two organizations were working on rural agricultural... Read more

Graduate Course Readings in Early American Religion

Last updated on: June 4, 2013 at 12:07 pm By Thomas Kidd

This fall I am teaching a history graduate course at Baylor (doctoral and master’s students) on early American religion, and have recently submitted my book orders. What am I trying to do with this list of readings? Several goals overlap: first, I want to introduce students to some of the most important recent academic titles in colonial American (roughly pre-1763) religious history. Second, I want to give students material to frame their own discussions of American religion, since most of... Read more