Tag Archives: Christian history

New issue of Christian History fights back against the church’s modern amnesia

Posted on April 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

Let’s get medieval on the church today!

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Seriously, it’s great to see this article, and this whole issue – which Joel Scandrett and I first envisioned many moons ago – come to fruition through the as-always-excellent work of Jennifer Woodruff Tait, Dawn Myers-Moore, Doug Johnson, Dan Graves, Joeli Banks, Meg Goddard Moss, Edwin Woodruff Tait, Kaylena Radcliff, Deb Landis, and of course our redoubtable Executive Editor Bill Curtis. You can peruse every page in glorious color at https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/…/issue/modern-amnesia. And if you like it, don’t forget to subscribe! (It’s on a donation basis.)

 

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Interview on Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog

Posted on July 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

medieval wisdom coverMany thanks to Scot McKnight for hosting Dave Moore’s interview with me on my new book, posted here today: at his Patheos.com blog. Patheos friend Kathleen Mulhern even featured the interview on the front page of www.patheos.com, which is “not chopped liver,” as they say–given that site’s millions of viewers monthly. It is tremendously gratifying to see folks picking this book up and engaging with it.

I also look forward to my visits to MacLaurinCSF at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis-St Paul) and Tyndale House College & University (Toronto) this fall, and to Upper House at the University of Wisconsin, Madison next spring, to explore these themes with students. I guess I’m a real author now, what with “book tours” and all . . .

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The book is out! So here’s a link to a whole website about it, and an interview clip introducing it . . .

Posted on June 12, 2016 | 4 comments

So, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age, with C. S. Lewis is out, as of May 17th!

Check out www.medieval-wisdom.com (description, blurbs, first-chapter download, links to bookstores carrying it). Here’s the first of five clips from a video interview my publisher produced:

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Your voice counts on the future of Christian History magazine

Posted on March 28, 2011 | 1 comment

As most of you know, I’m once again involved in one of the best magazines out there: Christian History. Under recessionary pressures in 2008, the magazine, which had been published since 1989 by Christianity Today International, ceased publication. Now it has been picked up again by its founding organization, the Christian History Institute (CHI), out of Pennsylvania. I worked with CHI to put together a special “re-inaugural” issue on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

That magazine has now been printed, and you can see the whole thing in its glory as a pdf “flip-book” here: http://www.christianhistorymagazine.org/. At that page you can also order your own printed copy, and most important, you can add your voice of support. Within the next 30 days, CHI will be deciding whether or not to continue the magazine as a print publication. The final decision will be based on responses from folks like you to the survey located on the website above under the sentence “Be a part of Christian History! Please take our brief survey.” Or you can just click here.

If you love this magazine and agree with me that it is an important resource for the church, then please act now!

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Posted in Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants, Patron Saints for Postmoderns, Resources for Radical Living

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Printing imminent! Watch for Christian History magazine issue #100

Posted on January 18, 2011 | 6 comments

The forthcoming issue #100 of (the reborn) Christian History magazine, on the history of the King James Bible, will be at the printer soon. The mailing list for the issue is finalized. This means that the special offer previously linked at this page to get on the mailing list for this issue is now closed.

I will be posting another link shortly where you can register your name and address to receive future information about the magazine.

In the longer term, if you are interested in the magazine and want to follow it in future, you can do so at the following site, which will be up and running sometime in March: www.christianhistorymagazine.org.

I understand that over 1200 people signed up through the web link previously on this page to receive this special CH issue. Thank you, all, for your interest in the magazine. I hope that once people have received this issue, many will sign up to continue receiving the magazine, so we can continue this tremendous resource into the future.

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Thank you, Ken Curtis: A pioneer in the popular communication of Christian history passes

Posted on January 3, 2011 | 12 comments

Ken Curtis and friends, onsite in Israel for a recent film

I first heard of Dr. A. Kenneth (Ken) Curtis back in the late 1980s, when I was still a fresh-faced, young adult convert within the charismatic movement. That was when I discovered the wonderful magazine Christian History, which Ken had started publishing in 1982 with assistance from the talented Dr. Mark Fackler, then a professor in Wheaton College’s graduate program in communications. Christian History showed me the true depth of our spiritual heritage as Christians—water in the parched land of evangelicalism’s historical amnesia. By the late 80s I had CH in one hand and graduate school catalogues in the other, and by the mid 90s the love for church history that I first discovered in Ken’s magazine took me first to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and then to Duke University to study in that field.

Despite the tremendous early success of Christian History, Ken’s primary business had never been magazine publishing. Continue reading →

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Posted in Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants, Patron Saints for Postmoderns, Resources for Radical Living

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Retired bishop calls for Christian history teaching in British schools

Posted on October 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

With the Bishop of Rochester

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, with the Bishop of Rochester

From an article in a British Christian online magazine. Though I am always suspicious when someone starts talking about “Judeo-Christian values” (there’s a lot of slipperiness in this language), I like this guy 🙂 . Also, based on my own recent research into the origins of hospitals in the West, I have to agree with his statement (see below) that the nursing profession as we know it is Christian in origin. Finally, his examination of the origins of modern British systems of law and governance fascinate–I’ll be looking into the details of his narrative . . .

If school kids don’t learn more about Britain’s Judeo-Christian heritage we risk losing our national values, a bishop has warned.

The Rt Revd Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali said: “The Judaeo-Christian tradition provides the connecting link to ‘our island story’”.

Children should know about the role of Christians in abolishing the slave trade, caring for the sick and improving working conditions, the former Bishop of Rochester said in an article for Standpoint magazine. Continue reading →

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Violence in Christian history: Proof against the faith? David Bentley Hart speaks

Posted on July 17, 2010 | 1 comment

David Bentley Hart is a smart fellow, conversant in philosophy, history, literature, & the arts, who will soon (a little bird tells me) be writing a comprehensive, textbook-type history of the church. Here he is being interviewed about the claim often made by atheists, including the so-called “new atheists,” that the violence evident in Christian history can be used as evidence that Christianity as a whole is a false system of belief, and indeed that there is no God.

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The two ways churches mistreat history

Posted on May 28, 2010 | 1 comment

Some wise words from the “Reformed Reader” blog:

Christians/churches are often prone to one of these two tendencies, as Carl Trueman notes:

“An idolatry of the new and the novel, with the concomitant disrespect for anything traditional; or a nostalgia for the past which is little more than an idolatry of the old and the traditional.  Both are disempowering: the first leaves the church as a free-floating anarchic entity which is doomed to reinvent Christianity anew every Sunday, and prone to being subverted and taken over by any charismatic (in the non-theological sense!) leader or group which cares to flex its muscle; the second leaves the church bound to the past as its leaders care to write that past and thus unable to engage critically with her own tradition.”

Continue reading here.

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Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

Posted on May 10, 2010 | 4 comments

Here is a review of the new Diarmaid MacCulloch book, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (MacCulloch previously published an accessible survey of the Reformation period). The provocative title refers both to the future of the faith, and to the presence of certain proto-Christian ideas before Jesus.

A couple of clips from the review, which appears on the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s website, and is written by Margaret McGuiness, chair of the Religion Department at La Salle University:

No text purporting to trace the rise and development of a major world religion can do it all, and Christianity is no exception. MacCulloch does at least touch on many important representatives of events, movements, and doctrinal developments. Topics as diverse as the teaching on Purgatory, Eucharistic doctrine, and evangelicalism are explained and placed within the context of major events such as the Reformations (Protestant and Catholic), the Enlightenment, and the culture wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

In addition, the author attempts to incorporate the role of Christian women into the larger history, and includes figures as diverse as the mystic Teresa of Avila; Angela Merici, foundress of the Ursuline nuns, the first active women’s religious community; and English Protestant feminist Mary Astell.

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