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...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
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...
The Necessity of Christian Education for Secular Society: Bishop Otey’s Sermon at General Convention, 1859
Bishop James Hervey Otey made the case in the 1800s for a Christian education for all society.
The Arabs and the Anglicans: Samuel Gobat and the Nineteenth Century Protestant Bishopric in Palestine
In the nineteenth century, British Protestants moved to Palestine for the purposes of missionary work among Arabs and Jews. One of most important early Protestant missionaries to Palestinian Arabs however hailed from Switzerland. Samuel Gobat, like most Swiss from...
Southern Presbyterians and the Roots of American Philosemitism
In the inaugural volume of The Southern Presbyterian Review published in December, 1847, Benjamin Morgan Palmer the younger reviewed Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews from the Church of Scotland in 1839. The...
“A Species of Patriotism, So Called, Which the Gospel Does Not Approve”
George B. Cheever and “God’s Hand in America”, 1841
“Education A Divine Thing”: George Washington Doane and the Divine Foundations of Education, 1854
In 1854, George Washington Doane, Episcopal bishop of New Jersey, addressed the students, faculty, and friends of Burlington College, adjacent to the Episcopal parish church in Burlington, New Jersey. He took as his subject the divine roots of education. “Education”...
A Review of *Reformed Theology*, by Jonathan Master
Humans, argues Rev. Dr. Jonathan Master, “need clear answers to the biggest questions in life and the most consequential matters of eternity.” This is because “knowing what we believe about God, humanity, worship, and salvation is important.” These two simple...