David Barton, Civil Religion, and Patriotic Idolatry

Last updated on: October 10, 2012 at 10:55 am By Thomas Kidd

Guest Post by Miles S. Mullin, II, of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s J. Dalton Havard School for Theological Studies A few weeks ago, popular Christian history writer David Barton presented his standard two-hour presentation at a church in my area. At the urging of colleague John Wilsey, who has written against the concept of Christian America that Barton advocates, I attended. I’m glad I went. As an historian, the problems with the story that Barton weaves have been obvious to me... Read more

Slavery, Historical Heroes, and “Precious Puritans”

Last updated on: October 9, 2012 at 9:41 am By Thomas Kidd

A fascinating controversy has erupted between the worlds of modern rap music and the early American Puritans, because of a song, “Precious Puritans,” by Christian rapper Propaganda. For brevity’s sake, I won’t explore all the commentaries on the controversy, but to catch the flow of it, pastor and blogger Joe Thorn discusses the song here with Propaganda, and Boyce College professor (and rapper) Owen Strachan takes exception to the song’s lack of nuance here. (More links below.) The song laments the... Read more

REMEMBER JAMES!

Last updated on: October 7, 2012 at 3:43 pm By Philip Jenkins

Not long since, there was the Gospel of Judas, then there was Jesus’s Wife, and pretty soon, no doubt, we’ll have claims about another new gospel and its explosive revelations concerning early Christianity. When you wonder how to respond to those claims, I would like to offer you a very powerful rhetorical weapon. Remember the Protevangelium! If the title seems cumbersome, then just think of it as the Infancy Gospel of James. Whatever name we give it, the text is... Read more

The Future of Evangelicalism Online

Last updated on: October 3, 2012 at 9:38 am By Thomas Kidd

From an important post from Patheos Director of Content, Timothy Dalrymple, in which he envisions the future of the Evangelical Portal at Patheos: Evangelicals are neither loved nor respected in the American public square. This is due in part to our enduring and principled commitment to truths and values the rest of mainstream society rejects, and in part to a tendency in media and academia to present a caricature of evangelicalism that elides its virtues and exaggerates its vices. But... Read more

SURGING NATIONWIDE

Last updated on: October 4, 2012 at 7:17 am By Philip Jenkins

Religions are not always what they seem. A colleague once told me of his experience teaching a course on cults and small sects in the 1980s, when he had required his students to go out and actually spend time with one of the then-controversial groups. (Something I would never have done, for reasons of legal liability, if nothing else). From a suggested list of available groups, several selected the Unification Church, better known as the Moonies, and they duly made... Read more

God and Presidential Debates

Last updated on: October 4, 2012 at 12:31 am By johnturner

It turns out that God rarely merits a mention in presidential debates. There’s often plenty of God-talk on the campaign trail and at party conventions, but not when the candidates talk with each other. As far as I could glean, the only mention of God in tonight’s debate was by Mitt Romney toward the end: The role of government — look behind us: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence… we are endowed by our Creator with our rights —... Read more

Sin and the Historian

Last updated on: January 27, 2017 at 7:18 pm By John Fea

This semester I am teaching a sophomore seminar entitled “Historical Methods.” Since I teach at a Christian college, we spend a lot of time in this course thinking about the relationship between Christianity and the practice of doing history. This morning I taught a wonderful essay by George Marsden entitled “Human Depravity: A Neglected Explanatory Category.” The essay appears in Wilfred McClay’s edited collection, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Eerdmans, 2007). This article... Read more

A Balanced Evangelical View of America’s Founding

Last updated on: September 27, 2012 at 10:22 am By Thomas Kidd

I recently reviewed David Aikman’s excellent book One Nation Without God? for Christianity Today. As I note in the review, Aikman’s book takes a balanced view of America’s Christian heritage: In the chapter on history (the longest section of the book), Aikman reviews modern Christian providentialist literature, led by books such as Peter Marshall and David Manuel’s The Light and the Glory, that portrays the American founding as uniquely directed by God. He contrasts this approach with that of academic Christian historians such as... Read more

Poverty, Chastity, and Delivery

Last updated on: January 3, 2015 at 4:49 pm By Agnes Howard

A mother expecting her twenty-fifth baby is just one of the shocks that greet young midwife Jenny, main character of the new PBS series Call The Midwife. Imported from the BBC, the show is adapted from a book of the same title by Jennifer Worth, midwife, nurse, and musician, who died in 2011. This is England? Some reviewers wonder whether Americans are ready for this kind of London life: slums and poverty of the East End, plus graphic scenes, not of... Read more

THE WALES WINDOW

Last updated on: September 25, 2012 at 8:42 am By Philip Jenkins

The new book The Color of Christ, by Edward Blum and Paul Harvey, is rightly drawing attention, and praise. To over-simplify a complex argument, it shows how changing racial conceptions and images of Christ have been used as political weapons, often in the cause of White supremacy. A radical departure from this tradition is the image of a black African-American Christ found in a stained glass window in the Sixteenth Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s a wonderful portrait,... Read more