History of Christianity

by Amy Voorhees

This is an excellent biography. It paints a sensitive portrait of Truth’s multifaceted religiosity that sheds new light on her entire nineteenth-century reform context. Washington argues that Truth, like many of her reform colleagues, was guided by “adherence to a beloved community, faith in primitive Christianity, and faith in American republicanism” (4). She presents Truth as a deeply unifying figure whose faith and shrewd wit enabled her to address a trenchant anti-slavery message to both white and black Americans, all of whom embraced her for it. There are some issues with the last element in this presentation, which I return to later, but overall this is a historically grounded and very careful book.

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by André A. Gazal

The foundational belief of the evangelical Reformers in the sixteenth century was sola Scriptura, the principle that Scripture was the ultimate authority in determining Christian doctrine. This is not to say that they (the Anabaptists notwithstanding) discounted the interpretive function of earlier Christian tradition. Even a cursory reading of works by Martin Luther (1483-1546), Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), and John Calvin (1509-64), as well as many other Reformers, would show that they frequently cited patristic authors, especially St. Augustine (354-430), as authoritative support for their particular interpretations of various biblical texts. Rather, the Reformers asserted the supremacy of Scripture to the writings of Church Fathers and the pronouncements of general councils in establishing articles of faith, with the Church Fathers acting as helpful interpreters.

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by Barbara Newman

At the monastery of Christ in the Desert, twenty-seven miles from the village of Abiquiu, the night is still save for coyotes and birdsong. A few seconds after the coyotes howl, signaling a kill, their cry echoes eerily from canyon walls. A red clay-and-pebble road snakes its way among the cliffs, which are striped with layers of beige, ochre, pink, russet, and purple rock. By the banks of the Chama River, a lush but narrow strip of piñon pines hints at spring. Elsewhere nothing grows except cactus, dwarf spruce, and stunted juniper. “Truly this is a desolate place”—beautiful, but desolate.

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by E. Brooks Holifield

David Hall, recently retired from the Harvard Divinity School, has done as much as any historian of the past three decades to shape the direction and hone the methodology of both American religious history and the history of the book and of reading. We have much to learn by looking at his career—his career so far—and I would like to examine his style of historical thinking by noting a series of metaphors that began to appear in his books and articles in the 1970s. The metaphors assumed different shadings of meaning, but they exhibit a consistent habit of mind, a way of thinking historically that will influence us for a long time.

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by George Faithful

It is a rare privilege to interview a leader of a living religious community, the historical roots of which one has been researching. I had such a privilege in June, 2010, when my wife and I had tea with Sister Verita of the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary in Darmstadt, Germany.

My research concerned the formation and early years of the sisterhood. I had many questions. How were its founders shaped by their experience of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich? To what extent had the sisterhood’s message and mission developed since its formal founding in 1946? What do the living sisters remember from those early years? And has the sisterhood maintained any sort of archive?

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by Joseph Kelly

Like many ASCH members, I teach in a liberal arts college in which few students major in religious studies, so the faculty members cannot presume a prior interest in the topics.  Instead we must win over computer science, English, chemistry, and economics majors.

 
Ten years ago I wrote a book entitled The Origins of Christmas which basically covers what the title suggests.  With my chair’s somewhat grudging approval, I inaugurated a course on the topic, and it has enjoyed considerable success.

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by Adrian Weimer

A colleague and I were recently discussing a Vatican program to collect the stories of contemporary Christian martyrs. The Christian church has collected martyr stories for millennia – what is new about the Vatican’s effort is its deliberate ecumenism. In a program initiated by John Paul II for the 2000 Jubilee, Catholics are deliberately reaching across confessional lines, honoring Protestant and Orthodox martyrs alongside Catholic ones. The desire to commemorate those who have died for the faith, both as a devotional resource and as a kind of competition for religious legitimacy, is an important strand in the history of Protestant-Catholic relations, so it is worth thinking about the Vatican’s effort in longer context.

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by Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter Williams

In March 2010, the Texas State Board of Education capped nearly a year of discussion by approving a new social studies curriculum for the second largest state system in the United States. The crafting of the new curriculum provoked considerable controversy, particularly with the respect to the inclusion of references to the role of Christianity in the life of the nation.

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by Emily Suzanne Clark

The Journal of Southern Religion (JSR) proudly introduces its first podcast. The JSR is the first scholarly journal devoted to the study of religion in the American South, and it is a fully peer-reviewed academic journal reflecting the best traditions of objective and critical scholarship. The JSR is published in its entirety online at jsr.fsu.edu, and we are currently working on revamping the site and will release the new site later this year. The new site will include a section for donations. We have been a free journal since our incarnation and would like to continue as such, and donations will help us do so and continue producing podcasts.

This inaugural podcast is a fantastic 20 minute conversation between JSR book review editor Art Remillard and historian/Religion in American History blogmeister Paul Harvey. The primary topic of conversation is Harvey’s new book Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South, including conversation regarding the book’s incarnation, Harvey’s other works, and the historiography of southern religion itself. Click here for the podcast, and check out our 2011 volume or any of our older volumes of JSR at the journal site. If you have any questions concerning the podcast or JSR more generally, feel free to contact JSR copy editor Emily Suzanne Clark at esc09@my.fsu.edu.

by Maria Doerfler

Perhaps it’s the time of year — the season wherein deadlines for new course proposals loom large in the mind of many educators — but I’m a sucker for new and creative ways of teaching students about … well, all manner of things, really, but religion and those aspects thereof that have some relevance to my field of late ancient Christianity in particular. As such, I was delighted to come across Times Union’s coverage of a new course offered in the University of Pennsylvania’s Religion Department.

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