Sunday, 19 May 2024

Evangelical History

Justin Taylor

Blog can be found on:

https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/evangelical-history/

Christianity and the American Founding: Bad Religion?

0 Comment

A friend who recently read my 2011 biography of Patrick Henry asked me (to paraphrase him), “Did any of the Founders argue that America needed the Christian religion, not because of its social effects, but because Americans needed salvation?” He raises a good point: for all of our arguments about religion’s role in the American Founding, we may not have considered the possibility that the Christianity of the American Founding could have produced watered-down “bad religion.”

I was reminded of th..

0 Comment

My Baylor colleague Alan Jacobs has a provocative article in Harper’s magazine, in which he asks “What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?” I say “provocative” because it has provoked intelligent and charitable responses from Albert Mohler and Owen Strachan, among others. I encourage you to take time to read each of these pieces. It may be one of the best exchanges on Christian intellectual life I have read, at least since the publication of George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian S..

0 Comment

1. You ever closed a year of youth group or said goodbye at a conference or around a campfire by putting your arms around your friends (preferably those of the opposite sex if possible) and swayed to this song:

2. You ever felt a surge of spiritual adrenaline rush through your body as you watched or participated in a skit based on this song:

3. You ever sat through a presentation honoring your Sunday School teacher or pastor, fighting back tears as you contemplated a scene in heaven where the ..

0 Comment

Today’s post is an interview with my Baylor colleague and sometime co-author Barry Hankins. His most recent book is Woodrow Wilson: Ruling Elder, Spiritual President (Oxford University Press).

Kidd: What difference did it make that Woodrow Wilson was a Presbyterian? Did that tradition contribute anything unique to his religious and vocational understanding?

Hankins: It made a big difference when he was growing up. But I argue that as a scholar, university president, governor, then president of..

Where Did the Footprints Poem Come From?

0 Comment

I grew up in a house that featured the “Footprints” poem in framed glass, hanging in our upstairs bathroom. When you grow up into Sophisticated Spirituality, you are no longer to reason as a child and you are to forget what is behind, pressing forward to higher and better expressions of faith.

But I admit that growing up this imaginative dialogue moved me and, I’m sure, in some ways shaped me. It seemed to convey a sense of the Lord’s nearness and presence in times of hardship and trial, and of..

Jonathan Edwards’s World of Publishing

0 Comment

Today I am interviewing Jonathan Yeager, religion professor at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, and author of the recently-released Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture (Oxford University Press).

Kidd: Most studies of Jonathan Edwards focus on his ideas or ministry. What drew you to write about the way his works were printed and disseminated?

Yeager: When I was finishing up my dissertation on the Scottish evangelical minister John Erskine, I read Richard Sher’s wonderful bo..

0 Comment

Donald Trump recently caused an uproar with another incautious (perhaps joking?) comment, when he hinted at the possibility of violence against Hillary Clinton or her judges, should she be elected. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said. Then he quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” Trump and his campaign later said the comment referred to political unity among gun owners.

I was surprised to see many conservati..

Free George Whitefield Curriculum at TGC

0 Comment

As we approach a new academic year, and as new Sunday School classes and sermon series start at many churches, I wanted to give you a heads-up about a free George Whitefield curriculum I posted at TGC a couple years ago on the occasion of Whitefield’s 300th birthday. I envision this three-week series being used in adult Sunday School classes, small groups, or perhaps Sunday or Wednesday evening talks.

George Whitefield, Wikimedia Commons

From the introduction to the curriculum:

“George Whitef..

0 Comment

In 1986, historian Harry Stout published The New England Soul, a book on the sermon as colonial New England’s “only regular medium of public communication.” Thinking back, I am struck by all the communication technologies not yet available even in 1986! When explaining the significance of the New England sermon in paragraph 1 of the book, Stout concludes with a now-dated clincher: “the sermon, whose topical range and social influences were so powerful in shaping cultural values, meanings, and a ..

75 Years Ago: C.S. Lewis Speaks to Britain about Christianity on the BBC—A Chronology

0 Comment

Seventy-five years ago C. S. Lewis (then a 42-year-old bachelor and an Oxford don) began a series of radio addresses on Christianity, broadcast to the United Kingdom during World War II.

In his recent book C. S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”: A Biography, George Marsden narrates how this came about:

[O]n February 7, 1941, the Reverend J. W. Welch, director of the Religious Broadcasting Department of the BBC, wrote what would prove to be a momentous letter to C. S. Lewis. While immediate invasion..

TLG Christian News © Copyright 2018 TheLivingGod.Online