Joe

Ballsy reporting of the infiltration from Europe of the most prominent left-wing street milita into America. While his subjects cowered behind masks, he stood in the open and documented the crap out of his story with 429 endnotes.

Fed by the Second Great Awakening, cheap communication, and a crew of passionate disciples, the early national period witnessed a revolution in religious possibility. Old traditions and networks that narrowed the spread of religiosity melted away, and the common Christian grasped anew the possibility of unmediated, electric communication with God Himself. More than the politics or technology of the era, the religious upheaval shaped the self-understanding of America as passionate, free, and divinely-orchestrated.

Howe's work is an apex achievement for a historian. It covers a vast, complex period (US early national) while skillfully condensing it. Undertakings like these are too easy to leave important clippings on the floor or to produce an unreadable multivolume tome. Considering some subtopics I knew well, he displayed mastery at consolidating the thick details into a few need-to-know paragraphs. It is a generational standard like Genevese's or Foner's.

Howe uniquely excels at sketching out topics which first demand a deep internal grasp before explaining them to others, like evangelical Christianity (the complexities of millennialism) and judicial hermeneutics.

The greatest limit to this work is a relentless moralizing tic, even though I agree with most of his judgments. But he is too eager to evaluate what he narrates, and often comes off as the uncle who cannot eat a single dish at Thanksgiving without offering his critique of it afterwards. I found some explanatory peace from reading his concluding chapter in another book on the Victorians, where he calls for a re-Victorianization of life, including heavy use of moralization.

One of the fresh narrative arcs for me was the transformation of John Calhoun's early buoyant Unionism at the start into the hardened defensiveness of nullification at the end. One of Howe's touchstones is Americans' constant hopeful embrace of the "shrinking of distance" sprouting from technical breakthroughs (like the telegraph and railroads). Yet by the end of his telling, Howe paints a picture of a nation brought closer together only to discover that familiarity has led them to question the wisdom of having done so.

Meandering civilian re-acclimation for a late 20s vet without much of a plumbline until he invests hope in an ephemeral internal encounter. I found the narrative flat and wasn't impressed with the resting point at a sort of self-creation. Immersive description of mid-20th Century New Orleans.

Deeply-sourced critical biography of the American church's fleet admiral of antimodernism. He lived a tragic hero, having first embraced modern German approaches to Scripture early in his studies. He then saw them as a needed push against the American church's parochial confinement. But the eventual Wilsonian deluge of modernity that followed forced Machen into defending ground he had earlier belittled.

Burnett's unique contribution is to show that Machen the Prophet did not spring forth fully-formed, but developed over time, paradoxically from some positions he would later reject.

Though he carried a hale-fellow-well-met disposition, his convictions increasingly demanded a willingness to stand alone throughout much of his professional life. The personal agony of his course makes him a paradigmatic figure for the despondence following the extinguishing of the long 19th Century's faith in Progress and Institutions in the ashes of WW1.

The most interesting part of the biography was the finding that the hinge in his scholarly life may have been provided by the popular mass work of working-class evangelist Billy Sunday, who quipped that he "knew as much about theology as a jackrabbit knows about ping-pong." His personal participation in Sunday's events ushered him over a threshold at which he had been lingering for a while.

Thorough at 750 pages, it will stand as the subject's critical bedrock for decades. Chronologically, it rushes through the end of Machen's life, eliding the institutional drama around bootstrapping of Westminster Seminary, and with a slight stutter, some facts are repeated in different chapters. D.G. Hart's biography remains a more concise and inspirational first look at Machen's life.

Much hope died in the early 20th Century, but looking back, one finds a bright beacon in the conviction of a man bound to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This textbook fits well in a course where American religious history is a subtheme rather than an exclusive focus on the history of Christianity in America (for which you would turn to Noll).

The necessary starting framework for the history of American religion after WWII. It recognized the actual turmoil of the period which split culturally univocal Protestant denominations into mainline and conservative patterns.

Evangelical preachers in the southern part of new national America faced the updraft and challenges of disestablishment. Their initial precarity aligned them with complex counter-cultural relationships opposing slavery and white disenfranchisement which ebbed as they gained a lasting toehold into local cultures.

The definitional book that named the American rise of formerly-European struggles over the meaning and direction of a culture.

Read the summer before moving to Texas for college, enshrouded with a sense of the epic journey and with much naivety.

Experimental, artistic, reality-challenging

Powerful text for the therapeutic school termed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), applied to the detachment of imparted meaning from the experience of chronic pain. However, the author discloses late in the book that it is written as a religious book from his Buddhist priors. That provides context for his call to make commitments based on what he sees as subjective values. Outside the grammar of transcendence, these become flimsy over time because they are based only around a metavalue of rejecting meaning in the face of experience.

In a barrage of so much "how to" SWE work, Z Notation is a great way of applying formal methods like set theory and lambda calculus to the "why to" of creating a system.

His graphic novels are stunning. His prose is meh.

Much improved from Noll's original Scandal because here Trueman links the content of what is being thought to the act of thinking together about it.

Would recommend as a richer, more holistic vision for Christians than Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Pragmatic guide to rejecting the modern fragmented family with an anarchist cookbook vibe.

This volume of 35 essays from from contributors looking for points of engagement across denominational lines orbits around a central challenge of testing the fundamentalist-modernist dichotomy that frames most 20th century histories. Lutheran Mark Granquist challenges the grasp of the ecumenical movement in assuming only one legitimate historical course championed by another contributor, his doktorvater Martin Marty. Granquist points out similarities between the confessionalism of Lutherans and that of OPC/Machen in that they sought an internal adjudication of questions of authority, not that framed by ecumenism. He boxes out the Lutheran embrace of language around biblical authority as chiefly the sublimation of their confessional principles. My only critique would be to suggest history shows more of a genuine two-way interaction, not necessarily that Lutherans used evangelical language around biblical theology as a weapon in a deeper internal discussion around a theology of the Word.

Landmark missiology text of the late 20th century. Best enduring contribution is the concept of a "people group." Absolutely descriptive is the "homogenous unit principle," which is the limiting radial span of cultural distance between people groups. Biggest missed insight is that there are people groups who want to expand their span.

This volume (OUP, 2025) finds that the 1st Century document The Testimony of Flavius was likely authored by the period’s most reliable historian, Josephus. Based on textual criticism, Josephus likely drew on the first-hand knowledge of people who participated in Jesus’ trial and the “first men” who participated in his crucifixion. In this document, Josephus upholds the scaffolding of the New Testament witness and disproves theories that the resurrection was bolted on much later beyond the apostolic witness. It finds a Jesus of history aligned with the Christ of early faith.

Overly-determined typology that's still a useful framework to know.

American toe-dip in the recent river of Scandinavian scholarship on the Hauge movement and pietism's broader impact. Published from a dissertation, does a fine job at surfacing primary sources, but the overall language is a bit clippy. Unfortunate titling.

It is the magisterial biography, but so unkind to its reader.

Helpful tool for praying vocationally. Profound illustrations. (Elliptical Anglican vibemaxxing)

Untethered from external guidance, the world after the enlightenment spins its wheels but fails to gain any moral traction. Its reasoning is solipsistic and more about soothing the self rather than exercising it to grow in virtue. MacIntyre performs a surgical dissection that opens up this world, unveiling just how little is there.