Happy Earth Day, everyone. Last year in my community, several local churches sponsored a speech and rally with environmentalist Bill McKibben. There was much talk about the important part that religious communities could play in resisting global warming, as if this were somehow a novel idea.

The American Society of Church History's Spring Meeting in Portland felt less like an academic conference and more like 30 academics hanging out. We held some panel sessions. We drank coffee. We visited some of Portland's historical church buildings. People smiled a lot. But despite the laid back atmosphere, this was a productive weekend.

I teach both a grad and undergrad course in the history of Christian spirituality. While the primary areas of my specialization are seventeenth–century Puritanism and eighteenth–century Evangelicalism I enjoy teaching the entire landscape of church history. In my classes we read and examine the writings of some of the “Communion of Saints” including Perpetua, the desert fathers and mothers, Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Thomas á Kempis, Jan Hus, Martin Luther. John Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Jonathan Edwards, John and Charles Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, John Woolman, Phoebe Palmer, Theophan the Recluse, representatives from Pentecostalism, Howard Thurman, Desmond Tutu, Watchman Nee, and Thomas Merton. Over the centuries we have tended to privilege oral and written texts by and about those whom we study. However, increasingly we recognize the importance of art and architecture and place and space as equally revealing texts. Regardless of the type of text we face a common challenge in reading wisely and well these records. This reminds us of the common task of interpretation. Recently, I was revisiting David Tracy’s summary of hermeneutical principles in his Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (Crossroad, 1981, see especially chapter 3).

  It did not have to be. The Falwells, the Dobsons, the Reeds, the LaHayes, all those who may well have given more contours to the term “evangelical” than any theologians - they did not have to be the embodiment of evangelical public activism that goes down in history. There was another option. Maybe there still is. One that protests abortion but also nuclear armament and imperial wars, that answers “what would Jesus do?” with “he would consume less.” One that thrives not only under the halogen lights and artificial plants of suburban churches but also under the scrutiny of Berkeley or Chicago academia. What sounds like a happy hipster fantasy from the fringes of indefinable 21st century evangelicalism is, in fact, a well-substantiated claim of David Swartz’s Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, just out from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

On a Saturday in December 2012, as Egyptians went to the polls to approve or reject a proposed new constitution, I arrived in Cairo to meet my colleagues Eugene Rogers, who teaches Christian thought at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Caroline Schroeder, a fellow early church historian at the University of the Pacific. The next day we traveled south to Sohag, where we met up with Malcolm Choat, a papyrologist at Macquarie University. The four of us had traveled to this bustling city north of Luxor to visit one of the most significant surviving monuments from late ancient Christianity, the church of the Red Monastery. Thanks to a conservation project led by the art historian Elizabeth Bolman of Temple University as overall director, we were able to admire the most extensive painted church interior to survive from late ancient and early Byzantine Christianity. It is, simply put, a revelation.