• New Volume in the Joseph Smith Papers

  A new volume in the Joseph Smith papers has been published: The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations. John G. Turner reviews that volume at Religion in American History.

• Gordon-Conwell hosts "Renewing the Evangelical Mission"
  Gordon-Conwell hosts “Renewing the Evangelical Mission”:

  Evangelicals clash over the future path of evangelicalism.

• Mormonism’s Black Issues

  “While many Mormons would like to forget the Church’s history of discrimination against blacks, an Apostle’s recent statements comparing the post-Proposition 8 Mormon backlash to the Civil Rights-era harassment of black voters have brought that painful past back into the spotlight.” From Religion Dispatches.

Inboden, William. Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 356 pages. ISBN: 978-0-521-51347-0

William Inboden earned his PhD in history at Yale while studying with Jon Butler, Paul Kennedy, and John Demos. He spent his career as a policy advisor for the State Department, for George W. Bush’s National Security Council, and for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He credits John Lewis Gaddis and Harry Stout for guiding him while writing Religion and American Foreign Policy. Stout’s influence is apparent in Inboden’s emphasis on lived religion and religious experience. Inboden also incorporates Gaddis’s focus on personalities, structuring several chapters of Religion and American Foreign Policy around vignettes of Truman, Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and H. Alexander Smith. Inboden wrote Religion and American Foreign Policy to fill a void in Cold War historiography. He believed that the religious aspect of the Cold War had been virtually ignored prior to 9/11 and what has been written since has focused on the Cold War origins of Islamic fundamentalism.

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• The Rise and Fall of American Transcendentalism

  David Voelker reviews Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007). See also Gura’s response to Voelker’s review on H-SHEAR. From H-Net Reviews.

• “When the Word of God Says One Thing …”: A Dispatch from the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind Conference

  Randall Stephens, one of the organizers of the recent Scandal of the Evangelical Mind conference, gives his report on the conference proceedings. He includes a video interview that he did with Mark Noll before the conference. From Religion in American History.

• How Mormonism Built Glenn Beck

  Joanna Brooks writes about Mormonism’s influence on conservative pundit Glenn Beck: “Some are familiar with Glenn Beck’s teary Mormon conversion story, but what many are not aware of is the extent to which Mormonism has given Beck key elements of his on-air personality and messaging—and how it may shape the future of American conservatism.” From Religion Dispatches.

• Review of Writing the Rapture

  Peter Althouse reviews Crawford Gribben, Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). From H-Net Reviews.

One of the recurring themes in American religious history is the adoption of religious ways of thinking in non-religious parts of life. Of course many scholars have studied the direct influence of these religious ideas on American history. But here I’m suggesting that patterns of thinking, ultimately derived from religion, control or affect much of non-religious American thought.

Let me briefly list some of these patterns of thought. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past two days I attended a conference at Gordon College on “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind—Fifteen Years Later.” The conference aimed to assess the relationship between evangelicalism and intellectual life, the topic of Mark Noll’s book on the subject. The conference program included discussions of the general state of evangelical intellectual life, as well as specific discussions on history, science, and politics. The following are the most important themes that I detected in the conference, some of which will echo Mark Noll‘s closing remarks.

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