Category: History
The Protestant World of Shakespeare
By E. J. Hutchinson It is a monstrous waste of time to try to convince oneself, rocking anxiously back and forth in one’s pajamas, that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic—or a Protestant. It is difficult to imagine a more...
Book Review: The Life of Roman Republicanism by Joy Connolly
By Coyle Neal In some ways, Dr. Joy Connolly’s introduction to the formal study of Rome mirrors my own. “I began to study the republican tradition in earnest in 2001, at a time when the promise of rescue it offered—by...
Notes on Edgardo Mortara from a Protestant Onlooker
Last week First Things, as the colloquialism earthily says, stepped in it. The occasion for this unpleasantness was the publication of an essay by Romanus Cessario, O.P., arguing that the church was within its rights when Pope Pius IX abducted Edgardo Mortara,...
American History, Structural Racism, NFL Protests, and the Kingdom of God
I’m pleased to publish this piece from Michael Graham. It’s a bit meandering, but what it does well is define terms, place the debate within a broader context, and walk through the steps of the argument needed to understand the...
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk–Chapter 3
We’re continuing our exploration of Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk today with a brief overview of chapter three. Chapter three may well be one of the most timely in the entire book. Though primarily about Booker T. Washington, the issues that...
W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk–Chapter 2 Overview
One of the main points Du Bois is developing throughout his book is that, to quote him directly, “the defining problem of the 20th century [was] the color line.”
Polis/Counter-polis: On the Civic Benedict Option
October 2016 was a simpler, more innocent time. We were all youths, wet behind the ears; we look back at ourselves with a kind of bemused affection. Rod Dreher assumed, surely—we all assumed—that Hillary Clinton would win in November, that...
Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Option 35 Years Ago
Getting historical perspective on a contemporary topic of debate is always helpful. Dr. Christopher Cleveland’s essay for us on the trinitarian controversy last summer is exceptional precisely because of how successfully he tied the current debate to historical debates and...
The “New Alarmism” is not new and is not alarmism.
When asked about the Holy Roman Empire the French philosophe Voltaire once quipped that said empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. I had something like that thought while reading Dr. James K. A. Smith’s piece for the...
On Presidential Politics and Evangelical Cultural Clout
If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to circle back around to Emma Green’s review of Rod’s book while also linking it to Katelyn Beaty’s review of the same published earlier this week in the Washington Post.