Those who of you who thought I had gone off the deep end with last week’s critique of Dr. Ben Carson’s National Prayer Breakfast speech will probably be even more disturbed by the fact that today I will be speaking at an international conference on secularism. (I explain my decision to accept the invitation to do a plenary session at this conference in a post that appeared yesterday at The Washington Post). In light of the “Secularism on the Edge” conference... Read more
A remarkable political asylum case has raised questions about whether the U.S. government should defend the right of families to homeschool. The case concerns the Romeike family of Germany, where homeschooling is illegal, and where families who attempt to homeschool their children can face heavy fines and even have their children taken from them. An American immigration judge granted the Romeikes political asylum in 2010, but the Obama Justice Department has been working to overturn their asylum status and have... Read more
This week The New York Times noted a new landmark in the transformation of parenthood. Julie Cohn’s article follows the experience of women in a Vietnamese village who, because war in the 1970s reduced their chances of becoming brides, decided to have children anyway. One by one they asked men — whom they would never interact with afterward — to help them conceive a child. The practice became known as “xin con,” or “asking for a child,” and it meant... Read more
We have just entered the season of Lent. Thinking about the history of this time tells us a lot about the church’s changing attitudes to those very Biblical ideas of fasting and penance. To understand where this time came from, it’s helpful – oddly – to look first at Muslim practice. Muslims today have a month-long-season called Ramadan that looks quite ferocious to most Christians. Between the hours of dawn and dusk, Muslims can eat or drink absolutely nothing. This... Read more
A few months ago, I went to Harper’s Ferry with my wife and daughter. It’s a very odd National Historical Park because the National Park Service clearly does not know how to interpret John Brown’s life. Of course, it would be impossible to interpret John Brown’s life without antagonizing some potential visitors. Was he a deranged madman? Righteous avenger? Terrorist? All of those? Recently, the National Museum of African American History put Nat Turner’s Bible on display. As detailed in... Read more
Political conservatives are singing the praises of Dr. Ben Carson’s speech last week at the National Prayer Breakfast. Carson, a Johns Hopkins University pediatric surgeon and an evangelical Christian, used the speech to attack political correctness and Obamacare. Oh, and did I mention that the President of the United States was seated a few feet to his right during the entire speech? Watch the speech here. Over at his blog “Clear, Expert, and Entertaining Connections,” Regent College (Vancouver, BC–not Virginia... Read more
As I discussed in my post “Puritans: The Original Republicans?“, few historians today remain interested in Puritanism as the seedbed of American democracy. But as demonstrated by Michael Winship’s excellent book Godly Republicanism, the Puritans may well have been America’s first republicans (small ‘r’), with their loathing of political and ecclesiastical tyranny. It has been interesting to compare Winship to Francis Bremer’s new biography Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds. Davenport is not one of the better-known... Read more
Through the years, I have written a good deal about the globalization of Christianity in the modern world, but that interest springs naturally from much older interests of mine in transnational linkages in earlier eras. As I posted recently, the church of the early Middle Ages was thoroughly transcontinental, with all sorts of unsuspected linkages between very distant regions. Nothing could be further from the truth than to imagine Dark Age Christians skulking at home in their villages and local... Read more
A few things online that caught my attention this week: Sean Wilentz reviews Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold Story of the United States. The secret writing of American slaves John Turner on Henrietta Mears and evangelical women Joe Creech reviews David I. Smith and James K.A. Smith, ed. Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith & Learning Depressing novels John Turner reviews David Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism Read more here Read more
I recently suggested that studying the history of the so-called “Dark Ages” gives a wonderful background for understanding contemporary Christianity worldwide. Nowhere is that more true, oddly, than in the central theme of globalization itself. When you explore the world of Late Antiquity, roughly from the fourth century through the ninth, you see a Christian world that was enthusiastically transcontinental, if not exactly global. Repeatedly, we see influence and ideas transmitted from old churches to new and emerging bodies, and... Read more
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