Category: History/Church History

Presbyterians in Egypt

Writing a report of his time as a missionary in Egypt, Andrew Watson had this to say about Egypt’s Christians: “In general, the Copts are a simple-minded, devout, religious people, with great reverence for the Scriptures.”[1] The stated goal of...

/ July 28, 2020

Back to the Sources: Notes on Chesterton the Historian

G.K. Chesterton wore many hats in his lifetime. His enterprises as a writer, philosopher, and theologian yielded a majority of the recognition, but we ought also consider Chesterton the historian. Chesterton—though it was not explicitly amongst his primary faculties of...

/ May 26, 2020

The Via Media of George Herbert

In these pages, M.H. Turner and Paul Owen ably articulate and defend the Reformed and Anglo-Catholic manifestations of Anglicanism, respectively. In doing so, they reflect a tension that has existed since the English reformation. As someone standing between these two...

/ May 11, 2020

Is Anglicanism a Gateway to Catholicism?: A Defense of Anglo-Catholicism

M. H. Turner’s “Why Is Anglicanism a Gateway to Catholicism?” seems to be written largely as a lament of the influence of the Oxford Movement on the ACNA. Turner calls Anglicans back to what is characterized as “Anglicanism in the...

/ May 1, 2020

Why Is Anglicanism a Gateway to Catholicism?

By M. H. Turner If you have been an Anglican in North America for more than a decade or two, there is an experience you have almost certainly had. You have known someone who got up one day and jumped...

/ April 28, 2020

Our Fathers Left Us Evangelicalism

My Father Left Me Ireland is a memoir of longing and reclamation. Michael Brendan Dougherty recounts his rediscovery of his cultural roots and taking possession of an absent heritage as he reconnected with his absent Irish father. Dougherty sought an...

/ January 6, 2020

Happy Reformation Day, or, How Melanchthon Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jesus

Obviously, everyone should celebrate Reformation Day. At this point, even the Church of Rome has surreptitiously attempted to take on board many of the Reformation’s emphases, albeit in impure form and without the necessary dogmatic changes—er, development[1]—that would allow her...

/ October 31, 2019

Reformation Day and the Waning of the Western Church

Reformation Day is a contested event in the church year. That this is so for Roman Christians is to be expected. That it is increasingly so for Protestants as well is lamentable. Part of the reason for that Protestant reluctance...

/ October 28, 2019

The Latin and Reformed Imagination

By Felipe Vogel “The Reformation … was more a song or a symphony than a system, more lyric than lecture,” claims Peter Matheson in The Imaginative World of the Reformation. Yet lectures and systems are likely what comes to mind...

/ January 29, 2019

Returning to the Sources: The Scholarship of Richard Muller

By Michael Lynch Today, if you walk into a random art gallery in the Grand Rapids, Mich. area, you might come across an 18th century Dutch landscape oil painting with a windmill or a church in its background. Perhaps, the...

/ January 7, 2019