In the furor over the recent situations in Boston and West, Texas, we passed quietly over the 20th anniversary of the April 19, 1993 final assault on the Branch Davidian center in Elk, Texas (conventionally reported as “Waco,” which is nine miles away). I do not want to engage the technicalities or disputes surrounding the tank/tear gas assault ordered by Attorney General Janet Reno, or the cause of the subsequent fire that led to the deaths of dozens of men,... Read more
I’ve noted recently how thin the lines between canonical and non-canonical scriptures were in many churches through history, and especially the millennium or so of the Middle Ages. But beyond raising an interesting point about different attitudes prevailing in the past, what does that tell us about Christian history more generally? Why does it matter? I think there are several reasons. 1.If you want to understand the history of Christian thought, in the sense of what a substantial majority of... Read more
I recently argued that, contrary to our usual assumptions, many of the old Gnostic gospels remained accessible long after the Roman Empire accepted orthodox Christianity. However much church authorities might have wanted to eliminate them, they circulated quite widely. One puzzling piece of evidence comes from Nicephorus, the ninth century Patriarch of Constantinople. Appended to one of his works is a Stichometry, a list of scriptures unapproved by the church. The fact that each is listed together with its length... Read more
Interfaith marriage is skyrocketing in contemporary America. A generation ago, around fifteen percent of Americans married outside their faith, which probably mostly meant Catholics marrying Protestants. Now, according to Naomi Schaefer Riley, the rate is forty-two percent. As Americans continue to delay marriage and drift away from their parents and religious upbringings during their young adulthood, it seems reasonable that soon most Americans will marry outside their religion. This, according to Riley, has major implications for couples and religious institutions,... Read more
From Bev Shea’s NYT obituary: Though Mr. Shea was long a vital part of Mr. Graham’s work — Mr. Graham routinely insisted that without him he would have had no ministry — he retained a wry modesty about his role. “The people didn’t come to hear me,” Mr. Shea told The Charlotte Observer in 2009. “They came to hear Billy. To get to hear him, they first had to listen to me.” It was not always so. When they joined... Read more
I have been writing about the Other texts that shaped Christian thought through the long Middle Ages, all the alternative gospels and apocryphal texts that literate people read with almost the same veneration that they paid to the canonical scriptures. One problem with finding such materials is that we often don’t know exactly the point of time at which they were used. In Armenia, for instance, a host of apocryphal texts survived, but in fairly late copies – sixteenth century... Read more
The scholarly study of the Puritans has been marked in recent years by attempts to understand them in a fully transatlantic context. This follows a broader trend in early American history to focus on “Atlantic world” perspectives, rather than proto-national American ones. While others could view this de-emphasizing of the future United States as ideologically dubious, I think it is a sanguine development for understanding the Puritans in their own places and time. I have recently written reviews of two... Read more
A more accurate title for this blog would be “Watching the Papal Transition from Catholic Europe.” But I couldn’t resist, even though I don’t have a punch line–or even a joke for that matter. But down to business. I am on sabbatical this spring semester, spending part of it as a visiting scholar at the University of Munich and enjoying wonderful lodging in the Herzogliches Georgianum, one of the oldest Catholic seminaries north of the Alps, and a hammer against... Read more
Whenever I teach a course on Christian history, I always use samples of music, whether medieval chants or modern hymns, because that was commonly the means by which believers heard and absorbed their doctrine. In recent posts, I have been discussing some of the alternative scriptures that so powerfully shaped Christian thought, and one at least of those has left a remarkable musical heritage. I’m speaking of what was once one of the most potent and beloved Christian texts: the... Read more
I posted recently about how the wide range of alternative gospels and scriptures disappeared from the Christian mainstream after about 400 – or rather, how they did not disappear. In reality, these Other Gospels were lost only in the sense that they dropped out of mainstream use for some churches, at some times, in certain parts of the world. The whole phenomenon really forces us to think about the nature of censoring or suppressing texts in early and medieval times... Read more
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