Celebrating MLK Day

Dr. Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech is still one of the great masterpieces of American oratory.



And his Letter from a Birmingham Jail is still one of the great masterpieces of American Christian ethics.

Celebrating MLK Day

In my opinion, Dr. Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech is still one of the great masterpieces of American oratory.



And his Letter from a Birmingham Jail is still one of the great masterpieces of American Christian ethics.

What American Christians Were Reminded of on 9/11

What a previous generation of American Christians were reminded of on December 7, 1941, another generation was reminded of on September 11, 2001.  May these words from Psalm 46 bring renewed comfort and hope to us on this anniversary of that day:

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear
though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved
into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling.
There is a river whose streams make glad
the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her;
she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

--Psalm 46:1-7

Mark Noll, the Civil War, and Lessons Learned

Patton Dodd has a brief interview here with historian Mark Noll on the religious and historical lessons gleaned from the Civil War.

For more on this subject, check out Noll's book The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.

Celebrating MLK Day

In my opinion, Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is still one of the great masterpieces of American oratory.



And his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is still one of the great masterpieces of American Christian ethics.

A Historical Glance at Colonial Baptists

"Persecution from the establishment - which ran from fines in New England and physical assault in the South, especially Virginia - was a steady fact of Baptist life into the 1770s. But for the opening geography of the colonies as well as for a society with opening ideology, the self-starting, lay-oriented, Bible-centered and thoroughly active work of the evangelical Baptists made them the mainland's most dynamic religious movement between the revivals of the 1740s and the Revolution of the 1770s. They were the primary beneficiaries of the Great Awakening. In the colonies of North America there were less than one hundred Baptist churches in 1740, but almost five hundred by the outbreak of the war with Britain in 1776."

--Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism

Celebrating MLK Day

In my opinion, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is still one of the great pieces of American oratory.



And his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is still one of the great pieces of American Christian ethics. But on this, the 25th anniversary of MLK Day, I want to quote from what might be a lesser known piece of his, "Paul's Letter to American Christians."

But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about "improved means to an unimproved end." How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture. Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but through your moral and spiritual genius you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. So America, I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast with your scientific advances.

I am impelled to write you concerning the responsibilities laid upon you to live as Christians in the midst of an unChristian world. That is what I had to do. That is what every Christian has to do. But I understand that there are many Christians in America who give their ultimate allegiance to man-made systems and customs. They are afraid to be different. Their great concern is to be accepted socially. They live by some such principle as this: "everybody is doing it, so it must be alright." For so many of you Morality is merely group consensus. In your modern sociological lingo, the mores are accepted as the right ways. You have unconsciously come to believe that right is discovered by taking a sort of Gallup poll of the majority opinion. How many are giving their ultimate allegiance to this way.

But American Christians, I must say to you as I said to the Roman Christians years ago, "Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." Or, as I said to the Phillipian Christians, "Ye are a colony of heaven." This means that although you live in the colony of time, your ultimate allegiance is to the empire of eternity. You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity; both in heaven and earth. Therefore, your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God's will it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.

Click here to read the entire thing.

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Over the weekend, I picked up a copy of Joseph J. Ellis's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. It has been a fascinating read thus far and offers an insightful look into the most significant people and moments in American history.



Here are a few random quotes (just from the Preface alone) that will give you an idea of the kind of thing you'll find in this book:

No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution.

The Civil War, for example, was a direct consequence of the decision to evade and delay the slavery question during the early years of the republic.

With the American Revolution, as with all revolutions, different factions came together in common cause to overthrow the reigning regime, then discovered in the aftermath of their triumph that they had fundamentally different and politically incompatible notions of what they intended.

Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.

Why is it that there is a core of truth to the distinctive iconography of the American Revolution, which does not depict dramatic scenes of mass slaughter, but, instead, a gallery of well-dressed personalities in classical poses?

Politics, even at the highest level in the early republic, remained a face-to-face affair in which the contestants, even those who were locked in political battles to the death, were forced to negotiate the emotional affinities and shared intimacies produced by frequent personal interaction.

All the vanguard members of the revolutionary generation developed a keen sense of their historical significance even while they were still making the history on which their reputations would rest. They began posing for posterity, writing letters to us as much as to one another, especially toward the end of their respective careers. If they sometimes look like marble statues, that is how they wanted to look....If they sometimes behave like actors in a historical drama, that is often how they regarded themselves. In a very real sense, we are complicitous in their achievement, since we are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior.