Protestantism Category

Reflecting on the Reformation

Tuesday is Reformation Day. It is a particularly important day as it also marks the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Readers have been inundated with books, essays, articles, and surveys on the Reformation this year. Below is some I have particularly enjoyed reading. Hope you enjoy them too. And don’t forget […]

Read More

John W. Draper as Protestant Historian

In his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), Draper commences his historical review of the interactions between science and religion by declaring that “modern science” was born in the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great, and indicates that Alexandria, particularly its Museum, was the first civilization to pursue a “practical interrogation of […]

Read More

Joachim and Draper

A number of historians of the idea of progress trace the notion to the mystic Joachim of Floris (1131-1202). Karl Löwith, in his classic Meaning in History (1949), believed that Joachim had delineated a “new scheme of epochs and dispensations by which the traditional scheme of religious progress from Old to the New Testament became extended and […]

Read More

Reinventing Christianity in the Nineteenth Century

Linda Woodhead’s edited volume Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2001) is a group of portraits exhibiting the range of changes, adjustments, and initiatives in nineteenth-century Christianity. The collection, individually as well as collectively, eschews the standard assessment that Victorian Christianity was a religion in crisis. Its aim is to “introduce the most important varieties of Christianity […]

Read More