Sir Herbert Butterfield

Readers of this blog will no doubt know of Herbert Butterfield's lectures on Christianity and History, originally published in 1949. The Cambridge professor (and Methodist lay preacher) has been the subject of a number of studies, including C.T. McIntire's Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (2004), but his public image will never look quite the same after Michael Bentley's new work, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield (CUP, 2011). Bentley has unearthed a set of private letters written by the historian to a woman with whom he had a passionate affair in the mid-1930s. The biographer resists the temptation to sensationalise his subject, and offers a sympathetic account of his religious and historical thought. By contrast, Stefan Collini's review in the TLS (19 and 26 August 2011) is kinder to Butterfield's adultery than to his providentialism.

As Collini points out, Butterfield's reputation as an historian has been in sharp decline. His Christian readership has also shrunk, certainly when set aside the immense popularity of his contemporary, C.S. Lewis. Lewis's childlike sense of wonder enjoys a greater appeal than Butterfield's world-weary cynicism. Yet Bentley makes the case for revisiting Butterfield's thought, for taking it seriously, and he deserves a fair hearing.

Evangelicals and the Church of England in the 20th century

Slightly belated, I note the excellent conference that happened at Wycliffe Hall last month, organised by Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden. Whilst declaring an interest, in that I gave a paper myself, it would be fair to say that it was an unusually coherent conference, and which pointed the way towards signficant reinterpretation of the Keele conference and of the relationship between Anglican evangelicals in England and those in the wider Anglican Communion. It also served as a call to serious, nuts-and-bolts work on evangelicalism in the parishes: an investigation that has hardly begun, but for which Mark Smith gave some important signposts.
See also David Ceri Jones' rather fuller reflections on his own blog.

John Stott

I thought it might be useful to collect together a few of the various tributes to (the late) John Stott that have appeared so far. Very happy to add to this over time.

Useful media files, photos and reflections from the funeral service are available from the Langham Partnership site.

Notices in the religious press
Church Times and Christianity Today

In the broadsheet press and mainstream media
BBC website, Guardian and Independent. I guess the Times has had one too, but as one needs to pay for it, it isn't listed here. For a limited time, also listen to the BBC's Last Word obituary programme.

Personal reflections
From others connected with All Souls Langham Place: Mark Meynell and Richard Bewes. Jim Packer's sermon from a memorial service for Stott in Vancouver is available on YouTube, and a similar one from Peter Jensen here.

Although it won't remain forever, the activity on Twitter is also very interesting, under the hashtag #johnstott. Hopefully more permanent, and surely a new type of source for historians, will be the online remembrance book here.

The language of cloning

I note details of an interesting article by Eric Jensen of Warwick on the current debate about human cloning, at Academia.edu. It first appeared in 2005, but is now available online.

An instructive dispute

An instructive dispute concerning Jane Shaw's recent book Octavia, Daughter of God on the Panacea Society, and more specifically the review of it by Frances Stonor Saunders in the Guardian. Bartholomew's Notes seems to clear the matter up, perhaps more so than the author's own response on the Guardian site.

Whilst not being anywhere near as dramatic as some others of the comments on the article suggest, it does show the pitfalls of research being funded by the (heterdox) organisations, the history of which the work concerns.

Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000

It's a pleasure to note this new book from Crawford Gribben, some of which was presented at the 2008 'Heaven and Earth' CHF event. More details on the Palgrave Macmillan site.

The Hamburger Index

I note an intriguing unpublished paper by Mark Hutchinson of the University of Western Sydney, using the online catalogues of the Library of Congress and the British Library as a means in and of themselves of tracing evangelical concerns between 1960 and 2010. The hamburger index is borrowed from economists looking for an index of currency fluctuation, based on the price of a Big Mac. Similarly, Hutchinson points to an intriguing way of tracing attitudes of those who describe themselves as evangelicals or refer to them, thus to a degree sidestepping all the many difficulties of definition. The use of national libraries suggests one way of doing comparitive work over time and between national communities; and is an example of digital history - of work either impossible or too time-consuming without online catalogues.