Research Category
“Rethinking the Conflict Thesis”: Interview with Shoaib Ahmed Malik
Posted on September 13, 2020 Leave a Comment
I recently had the chance to talk about my book and research with Shoaib Ahmed Malik at Academic Access. He has a great collection of other videos on his YouTube page. Take a look and let me know what you think.
“One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy”
Posted on August 25, 2020 Leave a Comment
Albert Camus attempted to “transcend the nihilism” through literature, which he believed could more powerfully depict and analyze existence than any philosophical treatise. He had lived through the travesty of two Great Wars and, like many of the time, felt that such bloodshed was absurd and meaningless. The silence of God—which was a constant theme […]
Camus’ Plague
Posted on August 15, 2020 Leave a Comment
A colleague and friend has recently suggested starting a reading group on Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague. Perhaps the timing is a little too obvious, but the Plague still speaks to us today. I read the book a long time ago—probably in my early twenties. It was actually one of the first books I read […]
Thinking about Theological Anthropology
Posted on May 23, 2020 Leave a Comment
Humanity has forever been asking and defining what it means to be human. But today answering the “human question” crosses scientific, philosophical, theological, moral, and social (or a combination thereof) boundaries. Some have emphasized a theological anthropology “from below,” using human experience as the source and criterion to determine divine reality. Christian anthropology, however, does […]
W. E. H. Lecky and the Progress of the Reformation
Posted on December 13, 2017 Leave a Comment
William E. H. Lecky (1838-1903) at any early age published a survey of the Religious Tendencies of the Ages (1860), which examined the contending religious parties in England—Roman Catholic, High Church, Evangelical, and Latitudinarian or Broad Church.[1] His aim was to “solve that great problem of theology, the legitimate province of private judgement.”[2] In other […]
Reflecting on the Reformation
Posted on October 31, 2017 Leave a Comment
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 […]
The 2017 History of Science Society Annual Meeting
Posted on July 20, 2017 1 Comment
The History of Science Society will meet this year in Toronto, Canada. A preliminary program was recently published with some really fascinating panels and papers. I’m particularly excited about attending a panel on “Astronomical Phenomena in the Nineteenth Century: From the Global to the Provincial,” which includes papers by Jim Secord and Bernie Lightman. That […]
McCabe and the Land of Bunk
Posted on September 16, 2016 Leave a Comment
Joseph McCabe (1867-1955), a Roman Catholic monk who abandoned his religious beliefs around 1895, was a prolific author, writing over two hundred books on science, history, biography, and religion. Historians of science and religion have largely ignored McCabe, and it is unclear why. But if historians are looking for the intellectual forebears of the so-called […]
John William Draper and His Sources
Posted on July 19, 2016 Leave a Comment
It has often been said, by his contemporaries as well as modern scholars, that John William Draper made little reference to other authors. This is not entirely accurate. To be sure, there are no footnotes or endnotes in Draper’s books. But he does refer to a variety of authors and sometimes even quotes directly from […]
