A few things online that caught my attention this week: Conservatives debate the meaning of God and country. Thomas Kidd reviews Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. David Barton is at it yet again The “theological brew” of the Brethren in Christ Church Henry Louis Gates Jr. on “growing up colored” Akhil Reed Amar on “presidential encores” Joseph Adelman takes on the National Association of Scholars Read more here. Read more
I recently posted about the annihilation of the church in Roman Britain. Writing the history of that church is largely a story of reporting negatives – not something that historians like to do, but sometimes we have no choice. (Let me stress again that I’m talking about the wealthier south and east of the island, not the north, west, or Wales). It is profoundly depressing to realize how pathetically little survives of all the Christian literature that must once have... Read more
Still reading through Richard Fox’s Jesus in America, I came across a reference to a beautiful description of Christ in an 1751 letter written by Jonathan Edwards to an aristocrat named Mary Pepperrell, who was grieving the loss of her son. It’s probably familiar to the many fans of Jonathan Edwards out there, but it was new to my memory. The entire letter is published in Yale’s online Works of Jonathan Edwards. After some preliminaries, Edwards suggests that the best... Read more
Did you get a chance to watch The Abolitionists last night on PBS? If you missed it, you can watch the first episode here. The series focuses on five nineteenth-century abolitionists–Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and Angelina Grimke–and their fight to end slavery in America. As I watched the show last night I was reminded of the powerful role that evangelicalism played in the abolitionist cause. Whatever one thinks about the role of evangelicals in... Read more
I recently read Jonathan Yeager’s excellent Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine (Oxford, 2011), and am struck by Yeager’s thesis that Erskine, one of the leading evangelical pastors in eighteenth-century Scotland, was especially significant as a “disseminator of enlightened evangelicalism.” Of course, Erskine was also an important theologian and preacher, but where he really made his mark was in fostering a transatlantic evangelical intellectual community of pastors, scholars, and readers. Erskine especially relished buying, reading, and giving away... Read more
The senseless tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut prior to Christmas continues to haunt me. We have had school shootings in this country before, to be sure, but the age of the victims puts this case, in my mind at least, in a category by itself. Too bad for public discourse that the “lesson” of this tragedy quickly became a bone of contention between those who want to limit gun rights and those who think “mental health issues” and our culture of... Read more
I am delighted to receive a quite unexpected endorsement for one of my books. In 2001, I published a book on Internet child pornography, called Beyond Tolerance. Its impact was limited by the fact that it appeared about a week before 9/11 (!) but it found a steady market among professionals and law enforcement. It also gave me the opportunity to testify to the US Congress on the topic some years afterwards. That brings me to Who I Am, the... Read more
At first glance, Mormonism is not an especially creedal religion. Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, demanded practical, ongoing self-sacrificial service to the church, not an assent to a particular group of doctrines. After his 1848 return to the Salt Lake Valley, Young informed its early settlers that they would have to forego sermons on “the glories of the eternal worlds.” Instead, he would tell them “what is wanting today.” What one... Read more
So much of Christian history is about the planting and rise of communities, a saga of creators and builders. On occasion, though, churches are destroyed, to the point that Christianity is eliminated entirely in particular regions. Alternatively, it is reduced to a miserable handful of clandestine believers faced with the daily danger of persecution and death. This is what happened, for instance, in North Africa or Nubia following the Muslim conquest; in much of the Middle East or China in... Read more
I enjoyed Philip Jenkins’s recent critique of a NYT piece on waning urban spirituality, noting that the Times perceived waning spirituality out of a desire for spirituality (or at least anything approaching traditional Christianity) to wane. Spurred on by his post, I reflected on some recent coverage of religion in the Boston Globe (digested during our New England Christmas). The Christmas season is one time of year in which newspapers that might prefer to ignore Christianity feel obliged to print... Read more
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