How the dream of a Judeo-Christian America shaped the culture wars
Healan Gaston excavates a label that has both divided and united us.
When family values belonged to all of us
The "traditional family" used to provide stability and comfort. Was it all an illusion?
The Congregationalist burden
Margaret Bendroth intends to rescue liberal Protestants from scholarly anonymity and the disdain that accompanies numerical decline.
Homely Abe
Today Lincoln is remembered mostly for his ideals. In his lifetime, people were fascinated with his appearance. This is Richard Wightman Fox's starting point.
Bonhoeffer’s loves
Charles Marsh brings readers closer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer than, at the very least, any prior biographer writing in English.
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The past is now
Margaret Bendroth and John Fea both contend that Christians need to encounter the past in all its complexity and humanity.
Protestant bibliophiles
What we read matters. But what should we read? Matthew Hedstrom describes Protestant angst amid the information overload of the early 20th century.
Sarah Osborn’s World, by Catherine A. Brekus
Catherine Brekus introduces us to a disturbing, heartbreaking and improbably inspiring life....
That old-time skepticism
Amanda Porterfield details the degree of rationalist skepticism in 1790s America—and its demise in the face of a Protestant counterattack.
Bound and free
Paul Harvey's introduction to the history of African-American Christianity emphasizes both the
fraught relationship between black and white Christians and the tensions
within black religious institutions and communities.
The Myth of American Religious Freedom, by David Sehat
In 1859, an 11-year-old Catholic boy, Thomas Whall, refused to recite the Ten Commandments from the King James Bible in a public school....
Murder at the rectory
In 1921, a Methodist minister fatally shot the most prominent Catholic
priest in Birmingham, Alabama. Sharon Davies’s book makes vivid the
pervasive anti-Catholicism of the early 20th-century South.
Becoming African American
Amateurish historians often tell us that we must study the past to avoid repeating its mistakes. Such efforts rarely work out well. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, by contrast, offers an unusual, complex and thoughtful approach to history.
Billy Graham, political operative
"Now Watergate does not bother me,” sang Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant in the unofficial Alabama state anthem, “Does your con...