History & Hope

The Vatican: Historical Constants and the Crackdown on American Nuns

Source: Norman Birnbaum, "The Vatican's Latest Target in the War on Women: Nuns," The Nation, 24 April 2012.

No organization survives for two millennia by marching, upright, in a straight line. The history of the Roman Catholic Church is one of a constant struggle to adapt to changes that threatened its authority. In the modern age, it has had to deal with Protestantism and the Enlightenment. It has had to deal politically with democracy and fascism, imperialism and nationalism. Industrial capitalism made its vision of solidarity obsolete. Indifference, secularism and cultural pluralism deprived it of the unquestioning obedience of Catholics themselves.

Too Bad He's an Adventist

Expressions of pity sometimes accompanied the fervent accolades often found in newspaper commentary on Lewis C. Sheafe (1859-1938), the controversial trailblazer of black Seventh-day Adventism.*  Such commentary at the same time manifested a parodoxical mix of bemused curiosity and gentle condescension with seemingly over-the-top admiration in attitudes toward Adventism.

In his chronicle of the black Adventist story, Angels in Ebony (1975), Jacob Justiss noted that members of Congress were among the thousands who thronged to Sheafe's evangelistic meetings in Washington during the first decade of the twentieth century.  Oral tradition adds that some left the meetings with head-shaking pity that the evangelist was "a colored man," implying that his abilities would have taken him much farther still, were it not for the color of his skin.  In the black press, sentiments of pity sometimes had to do with the gifted preacher's affiliation with the odd and obscure Adventists.

Tale of Two Bishops

Peter Brown of Princeton University, probably the world's leading scholar of Christianity in late antiquity, reviews several books on Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Augustine of Hippo in "A Tale of Two Bishops and a Brilliant Saint," New York Review of Books, 8 March 2012.  The following excerpt comments on works by J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz dealing with Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and John Chrysostom, who became bishop of Constantinople, both great preachers, who countered imperial authority with a "confident Christian asceticism:"

...After Ambrose became bishop of Milan, no one knew if he would last. He persistently defied the court of the boy emperor Valentinian II; he imposed public penance on an emperor, and he lashed out against the rich in his sermons. Yet he died in place, the Grand Old Man of Italy. John Chrysostom [depicted here to the right of St. Matthew in an illustration from a Greek codex], by contrast, was handpicked by the emperor Arcadius to be bishop of

Father of the English Bible

William Tyndale's achievement summarized by Robert Pogue Harrison in a recent article reviewing several books marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible:

If there was a genius behind the King James Bible, it was the English priest William Tyndale....

Before Tyndale was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1536, he managed to translate the entire New Testament and roughly half of the Christian Bible’s Hebrew scriptures into English. There had been earlier English versions of the Christian Bible, yet Tyndale—an extraordinary linguist with a remarkable literary ear—was the first to base his translations on the Greek and Hebrew texts. His translation of the Greek New Testament, which had been made available by Erasmus in 1516, became the first edition of its kind in English. Printed in Worms in 1526, it was condemned that same year by Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall and banned by royal proclamation in 1530. Nevertheless, it had considerable diffusion and popularity in England....

Top 10 Questions About the Inquisition

Cullen Murphy answers to Top 10 questions he gets in talking about his new book, God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, the first being, in short, What was the Inquisition?

It was a means used by the Church to enforce orthodoxy. Inquisitors would go out into troublesome regions, question people intensively, conduct tribunals and mete out punishments, sometimes harsh ones, like burning at the stake. Depending on the time and place, the targets were heretics, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, rationalists and sometimes people who held superstitious beliefs. The Inquisition everyone has heard of is the Spanish Inquisition, but there was more than one Inquisition, and the earliest, at the start of the 13th century, wasn't in Spain. And although Jews were sometimes the focus of that first Inquisition, as they primarily were in Spain, the more urgent targets were Christian heretics in the south of France and northern Italy.  more at Huffington Post

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

Reviewed by Joyce E. Chaplin, New York Times Book Review, 30 Dec. 2011:

Barry does impart enough detail about Williams to show how puzzling a character he was, exasperatingly admirable. He attracted the powerful and the intelligent. The jurist Edward Coke had been his patron during his youth; the poet John Milton was a later friend. Even his critics found him an appealing personality. The governor of Plymouth called him “the sweetest soul I ever knew.” It is telling that both times Williams fled an arrest warrant, it was apparently because someone sympathetic had tipped him off.

And yet Williams seemed determined to offend. “I desire not to sleep in securitie,” he had warned the Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, in perfect self-­knowledge of his capacity to be purer than the so-called Puritans. He stated that the colony’s civil authorities could not regulate “the First Table,” those among the Ten Commandments that governed religion; they could prosecute someone for adultery, but not for making (or worshiping) graven images. Next, Williams refused to take an oath of fidelity to Massachusetts, on the grounds that anything sworn in God’s name for worldly purposes was corrupt....

The Origins of "Under God"

Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse, author of the forthcoming Under God: Corporations, Christianity, and the Rise of the Religious Right, points to a mid-twentieth century campaign to link faith and free enterprise in delineating the phrase's rise to centrality in American civil religion ("For God So Loved the 1 Percent...", New York Times, 17 Jan. 2012):

The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.  more

 

 

Christians and Lions

The world's most widely followed faith is gathering persecutors, according to the December 31 edition of the Economist:

Christianity is growing almost as fast as humanity itself, but its 2.2 billion adherents cannot count on safety in numbers. That is partly because the locus of the world’s largest religion is shifting to hotter (in several senses) parts of the world....

...In Nigeria scores of Christians have died in Islamist bomb attacks, targeting Christmas prayers. In Iran and Pakistan Christians are on death row, for “apostasy”—quitting Islam—or blasphemy. Dozens of churches in Indonesia have been attacked or shut. Two-thirds of Iraq’s pre-war Christian population have fled. In Egypt and Syria, where secular despots gave Christianity a shield of sorts, political upheaval and Muslim zeal threaten ancient Christian groups. Not all Christianity’s woes are down to Muslims. The faith faces harassment in formally communist China and Vietnam. In India Hindu nationalists want to penalise Christians who make converts. In the Holy Land local churches are caught between Israeli encroachment on their property and Islamist bids to monopolise Palestinian life. Followers of Jesus may yet become a rarity in his homeland.... more

China Gets Religion

Ian Johnson reviews four scholarly works on religion in modern China in the New York Review of Books, 22 December 2011.  Some highlights:

"It’s no exaggeration to say that China is in the grip of a religious revival analogous to America’s Great Awakening in the nineteenth century (which also took place during a time of great social upheaval). By some measures, more Chinese (60 to 80 million) now go to church every Sunday than all the congregations of Western Europe put together, while China is now the world’s biggest Buddhist nation. Meanwhile, indigenous belief systems, such as folk religion or redemptive societies like Yiguanddao, are making a comeback."

Bartonism and Election 2012

"The Faith (and Doubts) of Our Fathers" (Economist, 17 December 2011) examines the religious views of the founders of the American republic and in so doing spotlights the misinformation purveyed by a theorist whom Republican presidential candidates extol:

...The best-known advocate of the “Christian nation” theory is a Texan, an author and evangelist called David Barton, who has been writing on the subject since the 1980s.

Among his recent claims are that the founding fathers rejected Darwinism (although they pre-dated Charles Darwin), and that they broke away from Britain in order to abolish slavery. In fact the southern states only joined the Revolution on the understanding that slavery would not be questioned. Strange as his views may sound to most scholars, Mr Barton’s philosophy is taken seriously in Republican circles. When Rick Perry, the Texas governor and presidential