The Kosmos and the Logos
Christians hold to a persuasive argument for what living the good life means. We believe that God has created all things through His ordered thought, the Logos (Jn. 1:1-3; Col. 1:16). When we conform ourselves to the image of the Logos, we are most fully alive. The ancient Greeks also held a belief in a transcendent order embedded in the universe. In an earlier essay, I explained that the early church recognized the truth of this...
A View from Nowhere: The Overlooked Problem of Entertainment Culture
by Frank and Christa Thornsbury All culture everywhere expresses thought; that is, all culture everywhere expresses a vision of what makes life worth living. Culture is always an attempt at making collective aesthetic and moral judgments. For instance, Homer’s Iliad expresses the ancient Greek sense of the good life by illustrating the virtues of courage and of the love of family and country. Shakespeare’s histories provide dramatic...
“A Critical Place”: Hannah Dow and the Memoirs of Nineteenth-century Women Missionaries
The first entry in Hannah Gould Dow’s journal records her decision to enter the mission field. On June 17, 1843, having found out that her fiancé J. C. Dow had been approved by the Freewill Baptist Board of Foreign Missions (Randall Movement) to serve as a missionary in India, she wrote, “I am now placed in a critical place. The question is, ‘Shall I go or not?’”[1] Like a growing number of young New England women, she answered in the...
The Day Three Pastors Died
Plane crashes occupy a strange place in our collective imagination. Musicians, politicians, actors, and other celebrities seem to die to a disproportionate degree in plane crashes. Crashes are almost exotic, by which I mean unusual or mysterious. How many times have you heard someone say you’re more likely to die in a car than in a plane? So we can safely say crashes are unusual. Furthermore, because the exact cause of crashes is so...
Free Will Baptists on the Frontier
by Eric K. Thomsen In late July 1822, David Marks, a Freewill Baptist evangelist from the Randall movement in New England, found himself several months into a mission trip within the rapidly expanding western frontier. After spending five days preaching near Portsmouth, Ohio, Marks planned to cross the Ohio River to preach in Kentucky. When the time came, the river ferry was absent. Unwilling to miss his preaching appointment, Marks...
Unity Movements among Free Will Baptists of the South Near the Turn of the Century: A Little Known Story
by Robert E. Picirilli During the late 1800s and early 1900s, several unity movements emerged among Free Will Baptists in the South. Two of these have just recently come to light and are briefly described in this article for the first time. Robert Vaughn and I have written the story in full detail for publication later.[1] Some historians suggest that such movements were the fruit of the Second Great Awakening. One such was the merger...
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