Sean Michael Lucas
All Content by Sean Michael Lucas
“Tinker, Tailor”-The New Generation of Christians
While American evangelical leaders pay attention to sociological data, they more typically read George Barna or Thom Rainer, church growth experts who utilize social trends to chart the way forward for churches. But the person to whom these leaders should pay attention is Robert Wuthnow. Wuthnow, who holds a chair in sociology and is director […]
“Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Mainline Churches” by Margaret Lamberts Bendroth
In Growing Up Protestant, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth offers a fascinating account of northern mainline Protestant attitudes about families and children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bendroth, professor of history at Calvin College, begins her account with the domestication of the family in the North during the mid-nineteenth century. As programs of catechesis were replaced […]
“Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work” by John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead, eds
At the beginning of his essay on Charles Hodge’s view of spirituality, Mark Noll writes, “This paper is a sympathetic account of a failure.” In many ways, Charles Hodge Revisited reads like the academy’s sympathetic account of what they deem to be a failure-the maintenance and defense of Old School Calvinism in nineteenth-century America. And […]
“Occupy Till I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World” by Dana L. Roberts
In a 1970 article, historian George M. Marsden provocatively argued that twentieth-century American Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism owed as much to the previous century’s New School Presbyterianism as to the Old School stream represented by Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield. With their activist brand of piety and evangelistic-oriented vision of ministry, many New […]
“Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham” by D. G. Hart
In Deconstructing Evangelicalism, Presbyterian historian (and contributing scholar to Modern Reformation) D. G. Hart joins both historical argument and theological prescription in his typically iconoclastic fashion. Claiming that the recent resurgence of evangelical history is nothing more than a historical and sociological fiction papering over the differences in the creeds, polity, and worship practices of […]
