In 1948, three Union seminarians hatched the idea for one such program: an experimental urban ministry, dubbed the East Harlem…
The ethic of discipleship in East Harlem
Protestantism
Imagining community
I was so glad for a book that systematically discarded the American “separation of church and state” paradigm, which despite…
How religion made modern sex ed
Beware the dominant narratives about religion and sex. Things are usually more complicated.
Conversion and race in colonial slavery
Why was black conversion so controversial? Or to put it differently, why did the baptism of enslaved and free black…
Comparison and classification in American religious history
The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and, even more spectacularly, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 reveal the power of the…
The Protestant Reformation and human rights
When we think of the Christian origins of human rights, we might keep this in mind: What we regard as…
The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany: An introduction
Why has public criticism of the German churches for their conduct during the Nazi era been disproportionately directed at the…
The breaking-in of the gods
In the early pages of my recently published book, History and Presence (Belknap Harvard 2016), I describe something that happened…
For God and Globe
In 1937, some of the most prominent and influential Protestant leaders in the United States travelled to Oxford for a…
Roots and routes of rights
Over the past four decades, a cottage industry of important new scholarship has emerged dedicated to the history of rights…