James Madison and Religious Freedom

Last updated on: November 18, 2022 at 11:29 am By Barbara O'Brien

Among the U.S. founding fathers, nobody cared more about religious freedom than James Madison. Madison (1751-1836), America’s fourth president, was deeply involved in crafting the U.S. Constitution and promoting its passage. His peers called him “the father of the Constitution.” He was the chief author of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, also called the Bill of Rights. And whenever people complain about the many Supreme Court decisions enforcing the separation of church and state — such as Engel... Read more

The Problem With Bible Readings in U.S. Public Schools

Last updated on: November 18, 2022 at 10:23 pm By Barbara O'Brien

In 1956, a student in a public high school near Philadelphia protested his school’s daily Bible readings and prayer. He thumbed through a borrowed Quran instead of attending to verses from the King James Bible. And then he remained seated, and silent, while the rest of the class recited the Lord’s Prayer. The rest is history. A court challenge that began with a high school student’s quiet protest of Bible readings was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963.... Read more

When the U.S. Supreme Court Didn’t Ban School Prayer

Last updated on: November 11, 2022 at 10:09 pm By Barbara O'Brien

It has been sixty years since a U.S. Supreme Court decision ended class recitations of prayers in public schools. Yet after all this time some Americans still complain about it. After every sort of calamity, a conservative politician or cleric somewhere is sure to claim, “This happened because they banned school prayer and took God out of schools.” Never mind that it’s absurd to think an omnipresent God could be kicked out of anyplace by a court decision. And for... Read more

Piety and Peril: Life in Medieval Irish Monasteries

Last updated on: November 7, 2022 at 1:40 pm By Barbara O'Brien

The 6th to 8th centuries were a golden age for Irish monasteries. The hand copying of books first became a monastic practice in Ireland, at a time when Europe was dealing with the fall of Rome and the start of the Dark Ages. Until the 13th century every book produced in Europe was hand copied by Christian monks, and it was the Irish who refined the medieval art of book making (in the publishing sense!) and taught the rest of... Read more

Monastic Book Production in the Middle Ages

Last updated on: November 7, 2022 at 8:35 am By Barbara O'Brien

Monastic book production in the Middle Ages began in Ireland. This is recorded in the book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. The book tells the story of how Irish Christian monks preserved much of the knowledge and literature of Greek and Roman antiquity after the fall of Rome, thereby saving civilization. The Irish monks did this by copying every manuscript they could find. They didn’t stop at Bibles. They copied Virgil’s Aeneid and the treatises of Cicero and Plato’s... Read more

A Brief History of Christian Nationalism: Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority

Last updated on: November 3, 2022 at 4:23 pm By Barbara O'Brien

This is a continuation of A Brief History of Christian Nationalism that will look at the pivotal role played by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority organization he founded. The last post traced how political operatives and interest groups over more than a century have gained support for their right-wing causes by linking them to Christianity. And now we’ve reached a point at which many people associate Christianity with right-wing politics. The Christian nationalist movement is the fruit of that... Read more

Christian Nationalism: Power, Politics, & a Distorted Gospel

Last updated on: June 2, 2025 at 9:32 am By Barbara O'Brien

Christian nationalism is much in the news these days, at least in the United States. It may be in other places as well. What is Christian nationalism? Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, co-authors of the book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020), define Christian nationalism this way: [W]e mean “Christian nationalism” to describe an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civil life with a particular type of Christian... Read more

Presentism in Religious History

Last updated on: October 23, 2022 at 3:13 pm By Barbara O'Brien

Watch out for presentism in religious history. “Presentism” in history is judging the past by the standards of the present. Presentism is criticizing historical figures and events in the light of current knowledge and moral values. It can also refer to cherry picking history to make points about current issues. Presentism gets in the way of understanding history objectively, historians say, although they often disagree about what precisely constitutes presentism. Also, I suspect that presentism alone isn’t the problem. It... Read more

The Evolution of Witches

Last updated on: October 19, 2022 at 10:43 pm By Barbara O'Brien

The last post was on the history of witches and how the European witch was mostly an invention of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Now let’s look more closely at the evolution of witches, especially the classic Hallowe’en witch, in religion and popular culture. Hallowe’en itself definitely has origins in pre-Christian European paganism. It evolved from a Celtic festival that marked the end of harvest and the beginning of winter — Samhain in Ireland, or Calan Gaeaf in... Read more

A History of Witches

Last updated on: February 9, 2023 at 3:58 pm By Barbara O'Brien

Let’s explore the history of witches, the queens of Hallowe’en. Witches inhabit spaces where religion and folklore overlap. The classic Hallowe’en witch, with her black pointed hat and flying broom, is a European creation. But there are myths from around the world about dangerous women with dark magical powers. This suggests a connection with Jungian archetypes. As Carl Jung explained it, The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure—be it a daemon, a human being, or a process—that constantly recurs... Read more