History & Hope

God's Hand in Emancipation

2013-01-01T10:13:42-05:00

Just six months before, hardly anyone in the nation’s capital would have recognized his name. Now, on January 1, 1903, the preacher stood among the “Prominent Speakers of the Race” chosen to address Washington, D.C.’s celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, according to the Washington Times. The Washington Post identified him simply as “the well-known evangelist.” The Washington Bee went so far as to characterize him as “the most learned minister in the United States among the negroes.”[i] The accolades for Lewis C. Sheafe [pictured] in the Washington, D.C. press resulted from a spectacularly successful evangelistic series...

Moral Minority

2012-12-28T21:30:20-05:00

David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Reviewed by Gregory Metzger at ChristianityToday.com: Swartz has produced a must read not only for those interested in American religion and politics, but also for students of global Christianity. In relatively short order (the book's main text comes in at 266 pages), Swartz gives a richly textured narrative of some of evangelicalism's brightest thinkers, most creative activists, and most controversial provocateurs. In these pages legendary, now-deceased figures like Carl F. H. Henry, Mark Hatfield, and Francis Schaeffer come alive again in fresh...

Moloch Worship

2012-12-19T14:53:58-05:00

"Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture.... "...The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a...

The Vatican: Historical Constants and the Crackdown on American Nuns

2012-05-11T20:50:44-04:00

Source: Norman Birnbaum, "The Vatican's Latest Target in the War on Women: Nuns," The Nation, 24 April 2012. No organization survives for two millennia by marching, upright, in a straight line. The history of the Roman Catholic Church is one of a constant struggle to adapt to changes that threatened its authority. In the modern age, it has had to deal with Protestantism and the Enlightenment. It has had to deal politically with democracy and fascism, imperialism and nationalism. Industrial capitalism made its vision of solidarity obsolete. Indifference, secularism and cultural pluralism deprived it of the unquestioning obedience of Catholics...

Too Bad He's an Adventist

2012-03-18T21:08:36-04:00

Expressions of pity sometimes accompanied the fervent accolades often found in newspaper commentary on Lewis C. Sheafe (1859-1938), the controversial trailblazer of black Seventh-day Adventism.* Such commentary at the same time manifested a parodoxical mix of bemused curiosity and gentle condescension with seemingly over-the-top admiration in attitudes toward Adventism. In his chronicle of the black Adventist story, Angels in Ebony (1975), Jacob Justiss noted that members of Congress were among the thousands who thronged to Sheafe's evangelistic meetings in Washington during the first decade of the twentieth century. Oral tradition adds that some left the meetings with head-shaking pity that...

Tale of Two Bishops

2012-02-18T21:09:10-05:00

Peter Brown of Princeton University, probably the world's leading scholar of Christianity in late antiquity, reviews several books on Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Augustine of Hippo in "A Tale of Two Bishops and a Brilliant Saint," New York Review of Books, 8 March 2012. The following excerpt comments on works by J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz dealing with Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and John Chrysostom, who became bishop of Constantinople, both great preachers, who countered imperial authority with a "confident Christian asceticism:" ...After Ambrose became bishop of Milan, no one knew if he would last. He persistently defied the court of the boy...

Father of the English Bible

2012-02-05T15:31:21-05:00

William Tyndale's achievement summarized by Robert Pogue Harrison in a recent article reviewing several books marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible: If there was a genius behind the King James Bible, it was the English priest William Tyndale.... Before Tyndale was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1536, he managed to translate the entire New Testament and roughly half of the Christian Bible’s Hebrew scriptures into English. There had been earlier English versions of the Christian Bible, yet Tyndale—an extraordinary linguist with a remarkable literary ear—was the first to base his translations...

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

2012-01-21T10:29:15-05:00

Reviewed by Joyce E. Chaplin, New York Times Book Review, 30 Dec. 2011: Barry does impart enough detail about Williams to show how puzzling a character he was, exasperatingly admirable. He attracted the powerful and the intelligent. The jurist Edward Coke had been his patron during his youth; the poet John Milton was a later friend. Even his critics found him an appealing personality. The governor of Plymouth called him “the sweetest soul I ever knew.” It is telling that both times Williams fled an arrest warrant, it was apparently because someone sympathetic had tipped him off. And yet Williams...

The Origins of "Under God"

2012-01-21T09:03:29-05:00

Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse, author of the forthcoming Under God: Corporations, Christianity, and the Rise of the Religious Right, points to a mid-twentieth century campaign to link faith and free enterprise in delineating the phrase's rise to centrality in American civil religion ("For God So Loved the 1 Percent...", New York Times, 17 Jan. 2012): The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in...