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.
Continued…
By Paul Matzko
– 25 October 2009
By Religion in America
– 23 October 2009
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. Continued…
By Lincoln Mullen
– 20 October 2009
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.
Continued…
By Lincoln Mullen
– 3 October 2009
On October 1 and 2, Gordon College will be hosting a conference, looking back fifteen years to the publication of Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Noll and ten other scholars will be speaking. You can get the details from the Gordon College website.
The entire Religion in America crew—Paul and Jessica, Lincoln and Abby—will be attending the conference. If you’ll be there too, send us an e-mail and we’ll get together.
By Lincoln Mullen
– 26 September 2009
Watt, David Harrington. Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 165 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-506834-4.
Ethnography is the study of human societies, a favorite tool of cultural anthropologists who seek to understand a community holistically rather than studying the constituent parts of that society. Ethnographers seek to directly experience a community without having to rely on the mediation of written texts. Historians relish archives and typically give short shrift to ethnography. But in Bible-Carrying Christians, David Harrington Watt used ethnography as a historical tool of analysis. Ethnography was a problematic tool for Watt since it required that he attempt to experience evangelicalism as if he were a member of our culture. Watt described his desire to “see things about the world that [he] could not see if [he] had not had them.” He sought a “space between belief and disbelief” so that he can understand our beliefs without embracing them himself. This was no small task for Watt, a self-described socialist, feminist, post-structuralist Quaker. Continued…
By Paul Matzko
– 11 September 2009
Murphy, Andrew R. Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 232 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-532128-9.
Most Americans do not know the word jeremiad, but it is a familiar term to scholars of early American religion. To them the term indicates a type of sermon preached in seventeenth-century New England. These sermons lamented that New England had broken the covenant with God made by its founders. If New England continued its decline, God’s judgment loomed, but if New England repented, then it would receive God’s blessing. But even if most Americans do not know the term jeremiad, they are probably familiar with the genre. In sermons or political speeches, they have heard the idea that America is a Christian nation that has disobeyed God and so faces divine judgment. The old genre of the jeremiad is still very much a part of American discourse.
Continued…
By Lincoln Mullen
– 29 August 2009
Lincoln and I want to elicit our readers’ philosophies of history. To that end, I’ve compiled some questions about historical philosophy that Lincoln and I have attempted to deal with in our previous posts. We want to know how you think about history. A philosophy of history is always in flux and we hope to refine ours through interacting with your personal historical philosophy.
What do you disagree with us about? [To get things started, I take issue with Lincoln’s contention that peoples’ “consequential choices are the stuff of history.” I believe that everything from earthquakes (the tremors themselves, not just the effects on human beings) to the courses of the stars are a part of history.]
What is the purpose of history?
Is there a “grand narrative” of history? If you believe there is, what is it? How does your theology, especially your eschatology, influence your philosophy of history?
Can we know God’s hand in history? Can we comprehend divine intervention in history? Should history be used to reward virtue and punish vice?
Do our choices influence history or is the course of history predetermined? What is the cause of historical events? How does free will (or its absence) impact your philosophy of history?
Ought we to make moral judgments about the past? Can we escape making moral judgments about the past?
By Paul Matzko
– 19 August 2009
ShowForth recently released a website about the Great Awakening that is a companion to their documentary DVD. The site has supplementary resources for students and teachers, such as biographies, essays, and primary sources.
By Religion in America
– 17 August 2009
“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” —Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics, vii.
In sketching a Christian philosophy of history, I see two essential questions. The first is what is the goal of a Christian historian? Paul has admirably answered that question in the first part of his philosophy of history. A Christian historian worships God through the right use of intellect. My purpose is to answer the second question: how does a Christian historian go about integrating his intellectual pursuit with his faith in Christ?
Continued…
By Lincoln Mullen
– 6 August 2009
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