Most modern readers find it hard to identify with ancient or medieval saints’ lives, written at times when people had such very different expectations of sanctity. We may or may not believe that Saint X healed lepers or foretold dynastic changes, but it’s hard to identify with the situations. What do the concerns of those early readers have to do with us? Well, here’s an exception. It’s called the Life of Severinus, and it tells the story of how a... Read more
There is a very useful but very sobering chart partway through James H. Smylie’s A Brief History of the Presbyterians. It documents the various strands that became American Presbyterianism and the many schisms that emerged from those stands (some of which later merged back into the larger Presbyterian churches): the Old School and the New School, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (and the Second Cumberland Presbyterian Church), the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Bible Presbyterian Church, and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, to... Read more
From the Fox News Archives–Christmas Eve, 2010–JF “Dad, why do people who are not Christians still celebrate Christmas?” This is the kind of insightful question that can only come from the mouth of a nine-year-old. My daughter wonders why people who do not attend church still have Christmas trees, bake Christmas cookies, put colored lights on their houses, go to Christmas parties, and give gifts on December 25. To phrase her question differently, she wants to know how Christmas—the birth... Read more
From the Patheos archive: ‘Tis the season to argue about religion. Or more specifically, to feud about whether to say Merry Christmas or Seasons Greetings…to call it a Christmas Village or a Holiday Village…or to allow a crèche or menorah to stand on public property. What would Americans at the time of our nation’s founding think about all this? They would have been perplexed. Perplexed, first, at the ways that we fuss about the public role of religion. As I... Read more
Last week, a guerrilla war was under way in the well-kept streets of Santa Monica, CA. Recently, Santa Monica has been at the forefront of the secularist war against the public commemoration of religious holidays. While normally portrayed as a “War on Christmas,” the campaign has also affected other holidays such as Hanukah. After years of displaying Christian and Jewish symbols on public property in the holiday season(s), the city has now succumbed to legal pressure from atheist and secularist... Read more
A few things online that caught my attention this week: Geoffrey Best loves his books Should social studies be abolished? Jackson Lears on Jared Diamond William Hogeland discusses his latest book: Founding Finance An English professor goes home Who needs the Constitution? The pro-life legacy of Roe v. Wade Read the rest here. Read more
Two recent sets of readings have set me thinking about sane, moderate politics. During the 1960s and 1970s, two very different attitudes towards the Soviet Union prevailed in the United States. Extremists advocated flat-out opposition and confrontation, on the basis that the system was so rotten that it would collapse if seriously challenged. However counter-intuitive this might appear, destroying the Soviet system was in truth the path to a peaceful world. Intelligent centrists and liberals claimed to know better, and... Read more
It is always a pleasure to open good books after many years. I’ve recently been thumbing through Richard Wightman Fox’s Jesus in America and Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus, which appeared nearly in tandem nearly a decade ago. Both are incredibly helpful to understanding both the diversity of American religious experience and the centrality of Jesus (in Prothero’s case, even to many non-Christians). I found this gem of a paragraph in Fox’s introduction, shared here without adornment, other than to say... Read more
I have been a fan of James H. Moorhead’s work since I read his American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War as a graduate student. As the Mary McIntosh Bridge Professor of Church History at Princeton Theological Seminary and the longtime senior editor of the Journal of Presbyterian History, Moorhead has had a stellar career as an American religious historian. I was thus thrilled to open my mailbox today to find a copy of Moorhead’s latest offering: Princeton Seminary... Read more
Sunday was the 200th birthday of James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian pastor and professor whom Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese called the antebellum South’s “most formidable theologian.” Thornwell was a great champion of what he called the “regulated freedom” of antebellum slave society. Historian George Bancroft once described Thornwell as “the most learned of the learned,” the epitome of the antebellum southern gentleman theologian. He graduated from South Carolina College at nineteen, and studied briefly at Harvard Divinity... Read more
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