Some years ago, Joel Harrington, an American historian, discovered a manuscript copy of the diary of Frantz Schmidt, citizen of Nuremberg who died in 1634. The diary had been published before, but the manuscript was more detailed and accurate than the published versions. Any diary from the . . . . Continue Reading »
Constantine styled himself, at times, as a new Augustus. Later Christian rulers modeled themselves and their propaganda after Constantine. In an essay in Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-century Writings on the Visual Arts , Richard Krautheimer comments on the . . . . Continue Reading »
Harrison ( ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment , 12-13) argues that the Platonic revival of the Renaissance was one of the key sources for the modern notion of “religion.” The point is clearest in Ficino: “In De Christiana Religione (1474), he . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter Harrison argues in his ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (9) that the Reformation contributed massively to the development of a new notion of “religion,” especially in the ways Protestants and Catholics redesigned arguments formerly used against . . . . Continue Reading »
Lobster, writes James Surowiecki in The New Yorker , was not always a luxury item. On the contrary: “In Colonial New England, it was a low-class food, in part because it was so abundant: servants, as a condition of their employment, insisted on not being fed lobster more than three times a . . . . Continue Reading »
Has what Milbank calls the “liberal Protestant metanarrative” become the Protestant narrative? I raise and explore this question at Firstthings.com today. . . . . Continue Reading »
Over many centuries, one of the standard ways for Christians to integrate ancient into biblical history was a twist on the ancient Euhemerist theory that the gods were originally kings and heroes who were granted divine status at death. In biblical Euhemerism, the heroes are biblical heroes, whose . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2007 lecture , Margaret Jacob describes the series of dominoes whose toppling helped produce the European Enlightenment. The roles of England, France, and the Netherlands are crucial. The Netherlands provided the seedbed because of lax censorship restrictions on any book not in Dutch and its . . . . Continue Reading »
After a long and sobering examination of the disagreements among Protestants, Brad Gregory ( The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society ) draws the obvious conclusion: Whatever its merits as a theological principle, sola scriptura failed to unite the Protestant . . . . Continue Reading »
Gregory provides a superb analysis of the self-imposed blindness of the historical profession ( The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society , 6-10). Periodization is itself a problem, with specialists delving ever deeper into their chosen period without trying to . . . . Continue Reading »
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