Philander Chase, Bishop of Illinois and Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, preached at the consecration of the first Bishop of Alabama, Nicholas Cobbs, in May of 1844. Chase took as his theme man’s defiant intransigence towards the precepts of the Almighty....
Miles Smith
Why The Church Fathers Were Comfortable With Caesar
“I might even say with good cause, Caesar is rather ours, being appointed by our God”- Tertullian
“The Christian Statesman”: Why liberal disestablishments need Christianity in government.
Moses Drury Hoge, the Old School Presbyterian minister of Peterburg, Virginia’s Second Presbyterian Church, offered a throaty defense of disestablishmentarianism in his short work on Christian statesmanship. He did not, however, propose that institutional Christianity...
Charles P. Krauth and the Conservative Reformation
It is en vogue among a certain subset of Protestant intellectuals, especially those that might be denominated Evangelicals, to hesitatingly endorse the events surrounding the religious changes in the first half of the Sixteenth Century. These events have been gathered...
Edward VI, the Founding of the Church of England, and Mark Twain.
Henry VIII founded the Church of England so he could get a divorce, or so the story goes. Roman Catholics and Evangelicals told the story to support the narratives of their respective mutual aggrievement at the hand of the English Church. For Catholics, Henry’s...
Thomas Jefferson’s statue, Uriah P. Levy, and the City of New York’s disregard for the foundations of Religious Liberty in the United States
The decision by the New York City Council to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from City Hall indicates a worrisome disregard for religious liberties associated with the constitutional republic Jefferson helped create. Increasingly “contextualization” of supposedly...
Evangelical Earnestness: Why it means we cant have nice stuff, and more tales from 1850s New England
In 1851 an orthodox Congregationalist minister delivered a sermon on earnestness to his parish in Danville, Vermont. He preached from Acts 4:13, which stated that the early apostolic church “took knowledge of them that had been with Jesus.” That passage,...
State v Parent in Modern Education featuring Angelo Codevilla and Robert Lewis Dabney
In 1879 Robert Lewis Dabney penned an essay fittingly named “Secularized Education” for Libby’s Princeton Review. Dabney’s essay addressed his concerns about the changing nature of education during the nascent Gilded Age. He served as a professor at Union Theological...
Some thoughts on A Protestant Christendom? The World the Reformation Made.
In the past several weeks The Davenant Institute has published Andre Gazal’s edited edition of George Carleton’s Jurisdiction Regal, Episcopal, Papal and a larger collection, A Protestant Christendom? The World the Reformation Made edited by Onsi Kamel. Carleston...
Southern Puritan Episcopalians
The venerable southern historian and liberal Clement Eaton wrote in 1964 that the “great change in southern religion in 1860 from that of 1800 arose from the intervening Romantic movement.” Eaton, like many midcentury historians, argued that individualistic soul care...