Thomas Albert Howard

On January 30, 1948, the Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi with three bullets fired at point-blank range. It was but a few months earlier that the religious massacres tied to the partition of India and Pakistan had occurred. Hate and anger lingered. As many as . . . . Continue Reading »

On October 25, many churches will once again observe “Reformation Sunday,” commemorating the day in 1517 when Martin Luther is said to have nailed his Ninety-Five Theses concerning theological reform on the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg, Saxony. This event continues to be . . . . Continue Reading »

On October 31, 2017, the Protestant Reformation will turn 500. How ought one commemorate such an epochal, complex, and influential historical development? While the date is still a while off, I have been thinking about the question a lot lately. In part, because my colleague Mark Noll at Notre Dame . . . . Continue Reading »

As I write these paragraphs, a friend of mine is treading through his last twenty-four hours of life on this earth. Tomorrow morning he will be executed, after thirty years in solitary confinement in one of our state prison complexes. I have never met him. But somehow, perhaps ten years ago, he got . . . . Continue Reading »

Founding the Fathers: ? Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America by Elizabeth Clark University of Pennsylvania, 576 pages, $69.95 If you wish . . . to understand German thought,” the German theologian August Tholuck wrote an American student in 1839, “I . . . . Continue Reading »

While a graduate student in history in the 1990s, I once asked a German friend what she found most remarkable about the United States. She recalled the experience of an evangelical woman telling her about the daily “prayer journal” she kept. This would in itself be unusual for a German, . . . . Continue Reading »

Since its founding, the United States has elicited much curiosity and commentary from European intellectuals. Oscillating between paternal interest and fraternal rivalry, Europe’s ambitious scribes have braved the Atlantic, written sprawling books, instructed us in manners and morals, and . . . . Continue Reading »

In recent years, there’s been no shortage of commentary on European anti-Americanism and the divide between Americans and Europeans on a number of issues—religion, most of all. The reasons for such a divide are complex and tied both to history and to how we think about history. For Americans, . . . . Continue Reading »