In his The Novel: Who Needs it? Joseph Epstein proposes that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “beyond doubt the most important novel published in the United States.” The novel’s importance lay, says Epstein, in its effect. But “important though Uncle...
Miles Smith
Protestants, Sea Serpents, and the Biblical Leviathan in the 19th Century
In the nineteenth century the rise of more advanced technology for oceanic exploration, the subsequent increase in maritime traffic, and the first major discovery of fossils of dinosaurs and related prehistoric reptiles, reignited the question of sea serpents and sea...
“Warfare has its place, its office”: Protestant Theology of War, 1861
As the scale of the American Civil War became clear to Americans north and south, Protestant clerics engaged the subject of war more regularly in their preaching. By the Fall of 1861 the conflict’s first major battle—called variously First Manassas or First Bull...
Politics and the Prayer Book Revisions of 1785 and 1789
In the aftermath of the American Revolution the newly Americanized Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States—the successor to the colonial Church of England, revised the Book of Common Prayer for American usage in 1785 and in 1789. The reasons given were to...
Napoleon: Strongman of the Evangelicals?
How have evangelicals related to the “Big Men of History”?
“Union and War”: William G.T. Shedd on Divine Sanction for War and Nationalism, Pt 1.
In the third week of November, 1862, William G.T. Shedd mounted the ornate pulpit of New York City’s Brick Presbyterian Church. Historian Mark Noll calls Shedd a high Calvinist comfortable with relying on Christian history to correct substandard teaching. His...
Liberal Empire and the Limits of Religious Toleration: The Abolition of Suttee in India, 4 Dec 1829
On 4 December, 1829, the Governor-General of Britain’s state-run monopoly and de-facto government of colonial India—the East India Company—issued what became the most controversial mandate of his administration. Lord William Bentinck, scion of one of Britain’s most...
Protestantism, Orthodoxy, and Islam in 19th Century Palestine
What happened when Anglicans tried converting Greek and Arab Orthodox Christians in 19th century Palestine?
Heinrich Graetz, and “Influence of Judaism on the Protestant Reformation”
It was in Germany, Graetz argued, that the Reformation, and a Jewish-influenced Reformation, gave the world Luther and modern Protestantism.
Ridley H. Herschell and Jewish Conversion to Protestantism in the 19th Century
In 1842, the United States’ major Presbyterian publishing house, the Philadelphia-based Presbyterian Board of Publication, offered to the public one of the strangest books they had yet published. The author, Polish-born Ridley Haim Herschell, hailed from a family of...