Lorenzo Dow
In the antebellum United States, more children were named after Lorenzo Dow than any other person. It is likely that more people heard Dow speak in person than any one else. His writings were so widely read and reprinted that Dow made a small fortune. In an age known for religious eccentricity, Dow could give any eccentric a run for his money. But despite his eccentricities, or because of them, Dow was a representative of American religion after the Revolution—a prophet of democracy. Continued…
By Lincoln Mullen
– 5 December 2009
While reading William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy, I came across several sentences that caught my eye. Inboden dedicated a chapter of his book to a discussion of US Senator H. Alexander Smith, a prominent anti-Communist and ardent prayer warrior. Inboden was interested in Smith’s epistemology, the source of his certainty that God had told him how to fight the Cold War. The senator spent much time each day in prayer asking for divine intervention in his own personal struggles as well as for guidance in Congress. Thankfully, Smith journaled about his prayer life. Representative of the quotes that Inboden included was Smith’s prayer asking God to “make me true to thine principles which are true and guided by thee and not those which are merely expedient or vote-getting.” Commendable, but not extraordinary.
But these quotations grabbed my attention: “God is with me and will guide me or I will make a failure in a big [illegible]. Of course God will not fail me but I must be consecrated” (Inboden 196).
Continued…
By Paul Matzko
– 21 November 2009
This Friday I was reading Timothy Dwight’s papers at Yale. While I was there, Kellen Funk took me to the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven. Buried there are several ministers noteworthy in American religious history: Lyman Beecher, Naphtali Daggett, Timothy Dwight, Jedidiah Morse, Ezra Stiles, and Nathaniel Taylor.
By Lincoln Mullen
– 7 November 2009
By Religion in America
– 7 November 2009
By Religion in America
– 27 October 2009
- 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.
By Religion in America
– 26 October 2009
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
