History & Hope

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...

Christians and Lions

2011-12-28T20:56:14-05:00

The world's most widely followed faith is gathering persecutors, according to the December 31 edition of the Economist: Christianity is growing almost as fast as humanity itself, but its 2.2 billion adherents cannot count on safety in numbers. That is partly because the locus of the world’s largest religion is shifting to hotter (in several senses) parts of the world.... ...In Nigeria scores of Christians have died in Islamist bomb attacks, targeting Christmas prayers. In Iran and Pakistan Christians are on death row, for “apostasy”—quitting Islam—or blasphemy. Dozens of churches in Indonesia have been attacked or shut. Two-thirds of Iraq’s...

China Gets Religion

2011-12-26T21:58:03-05:00

Ian Johnson reviews four scholarly works on religion in modern China in the New York Review of Books, 22 December 2011. Some highlights: "It’s no exaggeration to say that China is in the grip of a religious revival analogous to America’s Great Awakening in the nineteenth century (which also took place during a time of great social upheaval). By some measures, more Chinese (60 to 80 million) now go to church every Sunday than all the congregations of Western Europe put together, while China is now the world’s biggest Buddhist nation. Meanwhile, indigenous belief systems, such as folk religion or...

Bartonism and Election 2012

2011-12-21T19:08:16-05:00

"The Faith (and Doubts) of Our Fathers" (Economist, 17 December 2011) examines the religious views of the founders of the American republic and in so doing spotlights the misinformation purveyed by a theorist whom Republican presidential candidates extol: ...The best-known advocate of the “Christian nation” theory is a Texan, an author and evangelist called David Barton, who has been writing on the subject since the 1980s. Among his recent claims are that the founding fathers rejected Darwinism (although they pre-dated Charles Darwin), and that they broke away from Britain in order to abolish slavery. In fact the southern states only...