Why Are Christians Obsessed with Sex?

January 16, 2018 By D. G. Hart

Some people are worried about Christian/evangelical higher education and think the current climate of gay marriage and transgenderism may be the one that forces religious institutions either to conform or to resist. Either way, they lose their identity or their legitimacy. Near as I can tell, Carl Trueman kicked off the worried blog posts: Thus, for Christian educational institutions, the way ahead may be very hard. It will not simply be a matter of budgeting without federal loans. It could... Read more

Edgardo Mortara

January 13, 2018 By D. G. Hart

He may not be a familiar name now, though the recent controversy over Pius IX’s abduction of Mortara kicked up by First Things’ review of the pope’s memoirs has brought the name back to life (and Steven Spielberg’s plans to make a movie of the affair could even turn Mortara’s name into a household one). I became fascinated by the story so well told by Brown University historian, David Kertzer, that I wrote about it over four years ago, well... Read more

American Exceptionalism as Obama Nostalgia

January 11, 2018 By D. G. Hart

Only a little over three years ago, David Bromwich, who teaches literature at Yale, complained about the way POTUSes, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, conceived of the United States as exceptional. One way to track such an understanding of American greatness is not to look for a person wearing a red baseball cap with the phrase, “Make America Great Again,” but to notice when a politician invokes the phrase, often mistakenly attributed to Massachusetts’ first governor, John Winthrop,... Read more

Thick Roman Catholicism?

January 6, 2018 By D. G. Hart

What’s good for the goose dot dot dot Robert Barron, whose fame came with his evangelistic presence in Word on Fire Catholic Ministries (I prefer to keep the printed page as far as possible from flames) and is now the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, wrote recently about the way to evangelize nones (those Americans who tell pollsters they have no religion). Barron argues that one way to reach nones is through beauty, the way that Charles Ryder from Brideshead... Read more

Thick Evangelicalism?

January 3, 2018 By D. G. Hart

To include a large number of disparate Protestants, you need to overlook important differences — like the sacraments, like teaching about salvation and worship, like whether or not ordination matters. Read more

Lord, Teach Us To Number Our Days (but what’s with the helps?)

December 31, 2017 By D. G. Hart

The following comes from a piece written several years ago, “Life After Christmas,” which still captures this Presbyterian’s uncertainty about whether New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day qualify as holidays. Either way, it is the time of year when we change from an old to a new calendar. To help with that switch, Rachel Dolezal, the woman who tried to achieve trans-racial status when Bruce was becoming Caitlyn Jenner and found that race is fixed even if sex is... Read more

What Christmas Gets Wrong

December 29, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Generally speaking, Jesus as the baby is a lot more reassuring to most of us than Jesus the warring antagonist. What would Jesus do? Upset people. Put that on a bracelet. Read more

The New Yorker Now Carries Water for New Evangelicalism?

December 22, 2017 By D. G. Hart

What did Tim Keller know, and when did he know it? That is the question that some readers should be asking after pondering the New York City pastor's piece in arguably the nation's premier magazine for journalism and fiction. Read more

Evangelicalism Is a Subset of Protestantism

December 19, 2017 By D. G. Hart

With some born-again Protestants in the United States feeling nervous about evangelicalism as an identity — thanks to the EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT!!! — who voted for President Trump, along comes one of the premier historians of fundamentalism and evangelicalism to reassure the faint-hearted. George Marsden wrote a guest post that argued for seeing evangelicalism from the perspective of the big picture. That larger outlook means acknowledging that evangelicalism is so much bigger — a worldwide movement — than the political identity... Read more

Proof of American Greatness

December 15, 2017 By D. G. Hart

Voters do not have to make the kind of political calculations that haunted Europeans. Here are a couple of amazing ironies that emerge in the latest installment of the Joseph Stalin biography (reviewed here by Keith Gessen). Imagine if Stalin had allowed Communist parties to form alliances with social democrats: Most significant, from Stalin’s perspective, was that he really did have critics within the Party. He had critics because he was not Lenin. He had not almost single-handedly built a... Read more