In his religious biography of Woodrow Wilson, Barry Hankins notes that Wilson’s father—prominent southern Presbyterian minister and professor Joseph Ruggles Wilson—stated after his son’s election as a ruling elder that "I would rather that he held that position than...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
Family Worship and Christian Nationalism in the Early Republic
John Stark Ravenscroft served as bishop of North Carolina from 1823 to 1830. He hailed from an old Virginia family noted for their Tory sympathies during the American Revolution. Although he was born in Virginia, Ravenscroft’s earliest memories were from Scotland,...
Leithart on empire and Russia/Ukraine
Segments of the Christian right have flirted with a sort of schadenfreude during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The West, they believe, is so bad and the American regime so benighted that anything must be better. That anything, in this rendering, is the Russian...
Liberalism contra Secularism and Theocracy: A Reply to Mark Tooley
I recently read with interest Mark Tooley’s piece “Democracy vs Theocracy.” Tooley argues that for some “magisterial Protestants” and Catholic integralists, modernity is corrupt and the aberrant exception to the human story. A return to “traditional” societies, in...
Episcopalian Debates on Calvinism and the Articles, ca 1801
In 1820 Dr. William White, Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania, published Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. The work catalogued and narrated the history of the Episcopal Church from its advent in 1789. White enlarged the work in...
Ash Wednesday in the Pre-Tractarian Church of England
In 1809, well before the Tractarian controversy began to rage in the Church of England, a Dr. Riddoch took it upon himself to explain why Anglicans retained Ash Wednesday services. He prefaced his work by mentioning five books that communicants should read to prepare...
The Second Great Awakening, “Evangelicalism,” and Jan 6.
In the aftermath of the January 6 riots at the United States Capitol a flurry of journalistic and scholarly pieces warning about Christian nationalism overtaking orthodox Christianity have been written. Recently some of the writers who issue these warnings have...
Free Church in a Free State: Philip Schaff on Disestablishment
In his 1888 Church and State in the United States Philip Schaff argued that what made Christianity in the American republic unique was that it was a “FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE, or a SELF-SUPPORTING AND SELF-GOVERNING CHRISTIANITY IN INDEPENDENT BUT FRIENDLY RELATION...
The Protestant Defence of Prejudice
Presbyterian minister John Grier Hibben published A Defence of Prejudice in 1911. As a professor at Princeton University he gained a reputation as an opponent of university president Woodrow Wilson. In 1910 Wilson became governor of New Jersey and in 1912 university...
Epiphany in America, 2022
*I've chosen this week to post in its entirety the Epiphany homily written by Rev. Alan R. Crippen II, rector of Holy Trinity Parish, Diocese of the Living Word, Anglican Church in North America, in Hillsdale Michigan, delivered on Sunday 9 January 2022. Let the words...