A New Direction for Christian Historians?

Over at Books and Culture, Alister Chapman has reviewed a recent book of essays on Christianity and the practice of history: John Fea, Jay Green, Eric Miller, eds, Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation (University of Notre Dame, 2009).

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2012/janfeb/newdirection.html?paging=off

CHF Spring Conference: From 1662 to 2012

Our Spring Conference will be held on Monday 26 March 2012 at Gladstone's Library, Hawarden. This year marks the 350th anniversary of the 1662 ejection of Nonconformist ministers from the Church of England, so our theme is '350 Years of Nonconformist History'. The speakers are all contributing to the forthcoming T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity. They will be addressing a number of major themes:

- The Denominations: John Briggs (Keele), Densil Morgan (Trinity St David)
- Church and State: John Coffey (Leicester), John Wolffe (Open University)
- Mission and the World: David Ceri Jones (Abersytwyth), David Jeremy (Manchester Met)
- Writing the History of Nonconformity: Densil Morgan and Robert Pope (Trinity St David)

For bookings, contact Prof John Wollfe, 3 Sunny Hill, Hendon, London, NW4 4LN, or email him at j.r.wolffe@open.ac.uk

The cost is £15 per head. Lunch can be paid for in the dining room. Accomodation is also available at the Library (£39/£54) - this includes breakfast and dinner.

Conference on Faith and History - 2012 Conference

Our sister organisation in North America, the Conference on Faith and History holds its 28th biennial conference in October 2012 at Gordon College, Massachusetts. The theme is 'Cultural Change and Adaptation'. Further details and the Call for Papers can be found here:
http://www.huntington.edu/cfh/conference.htm

CHF and the Conference on Faith and History are keen to build closer connections, so participants from the UK would be very welcome at this conference.

The CFH publishes a refereed journal, Fides et Historia, with two issues per year. The most recent has a section on 'Reconciling the Historian's Craft and Religious Belief', with contributions from Brad Gregory, Mark Noll, David Hollinger, Anthea Butler and Bruce Kuklick. Jonathan Yeager has blogged about it here:
http://esrh.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-issues-of-fides-et-historia.html

For more information about the Conference on Faith and History see its website:
www.huntington.edu/cfh/default.htm

Podcasts - Interviews with Bebbington, Larsen, Kidd

Al Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has a regular series of podcast conversations with leading public intellectuals, including Stanley Fish, Peter Berger, Steven Pinker and Roger Scruton. He has also interviewed historians like Andrew Roberts and Eric Foner, as well as scholars associated with CHF and the Conference on Faith and History: David Bebbington, Timothy Larsen and Thomas Kidd. It makes for intriguing listening, especially as the interviewees come from all over the ideological map.

To listen, go to 'Thinking in Public':
http://www.albertmohler.com/category/podcast/

Timothy Larsen on the Victorian Bible

An interesting extended review of A People of One Book has just appeared in Reviews in History, along with a response from Larsen himself.

The TLS & the scandal of the Evangelical mind

This week's TLS makes great reading for anyone interested in Christianity and History. Tom Wright has a two page spread on new studies of Jesus by Joseph Ratzinger (aka the Pope), Maurice Casey and Bruce Fisk. Anthony Kenny has a characteristically fair-minded review of a history of philosophical thought on the soul written by two Christian philosophers. The classicist Kate Cooper considers Peter Leithart's provocative study, Defending Constantine. David Martin reviews a book on secularisation.

Back in 1995, the historian Mark Noll lamented the scandal of the Evangelical mind. This week's TLS suggests that the health of the Evangelical mind might be improving (as Noll himself admits in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind). Exhibit A is Tom Wright, the world's most renowned New Testament scholar; he reviews Bruce Fisk, who teaches at Westmont College, and presents a clever popularisation of recent work on the historical Jesus; the philosophers Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (whom Kenny reviews) have both been involved with the Evangelical Philosophical Society; Peter Leithart is a Reformed theologian with a voracious intellectual appetite; the opening review engages with The Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, co-edited by David Livingstone FBA, who has worked closely with Noll on the Evangelical response to Darwinism; and the book on secularisation is co-edited by Timothy Shah, a scholar of foreign relations who has been leading a two-year project on 'the opening of the Evangelical mind':
http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/38/

This is not bad for a single issue of the TLS, and it shows how British and American Evangelicals (of various stripes) are producing first-rate scholarship in biblical studies, philosophy of religion, the history of science, sociology and foreign affairs.

Wright's review of the Pope's Life of Jesus can be read online:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article842102.ece

Open Peer Review: a glimpse of the future ?

Dipping one's toe tentatively into the new world of Open Peer Review, a draft paper of mine on archbishop Michael Ramsey is now available for comment and criticism at the History Working Papers Project. The idea is that HWPP can re-create the interchange of a seminar online, with readers commenting on the paper as a whole and on individual paragraphs, with an opportunity for the author to respond, and post revised versions for subsequent rounds of review. More on the HWPP project is available here, and there is some interesting thinking about the direction in which peer review might go by Jane Winters of the IHR.

I am sure that the creators of the HWPP would be delighted to have as many scholars as possible, from every specialism, try to use the site and let them have any feedback.

This particular paper examines the petitions that were made to Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, to call a national day of prayer. It considers the grounds upon which the petitions was made, and the Church’s official reactions to them. In doing so, it sheds light from an unaccustomed angle onto attitudes towards petitionary prayer among some of the British public, on understandings of the role of the archbishop as leader of the nation’s religious life, and of the recent providential history of the nation, particularly during the 1939-45 war.