William Jennings Bryan and the Progressive Era
American history is filled with interesting cultural changes and transformations. While we focus rightly most of our attention on the founding era or the War Between the States, other time periods are also important for understanding how the United States came to be what it is today. One such time period is the years between 1880 and 1920, which historians usually refer to as the Progressive Era. This historical moment, which is often...
Economics: Theological Foundations
In his celebrated 1994 work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, evangelical historian Mark Noll dourly concluded that evangelical’s “intellectual sterility” had produced “virtually no insights into how, under God, the natural world proceeded, how human societies worked, why human nature acted the way it did, or what constituted the blessings and perils of culture.”[1] While I have written elsewhere that Noll’s thesis exaggerates the...
What Concord Hath Christ with Marx: Can Socialism and Marxism be Christianized?
Socialism has become a dominant topic of discussion in American culture recently. Since the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders (b. 1941), many Democrats across America have made public their affinity for socialism and socialist policies. No one who has spent time on a state or liberal private university campus in recent years should be surprised by this development. Democrats are simply playing to a significant portion of...
Living Near the Land: An Autobiography of Agrarianism
by Phillip T. and Megan M. Morgan The excitement surrounding the 2017 documentary, Look and See, which engages the agrarian thought of Wendell Berry, highlights some of the fault lines in modern America. Many have grown tired of the empty promises of industrialization, while others have simply noted the soulless and placeless quality of the ubiquitous concrete and mallscapes of our cities. Even those in rural America have not escaped...
The End of History
Christianity is inherently concerned with history. Early twentieth-century historian Marc Bloch went so far as to say, “Christianity is a religion of historians.”[1] He could make this claim because, unlike other religions, Christianity doesn’t derive its doctrines or rituals from mythology that is inherently outside time. Rather, “for sacred books, the Christians have books of history.”[2] The Bible is filled with history and...
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