Jim Bratt This post originally appeared in The Twelve: Reformed Done Daily on November 8, 2021. Colin Powell at a meeting of the national security council at the White House on the day following the 9/11 attacks in 2001 with, from left, Donald Rumsfeld, President George W Bush and Dick Cheney. Photograph: Doug Mills/AP Colin Powell …
Continue reading The Good Soldier: The Tragedy of Colin Powell
Jim Bratt This post originally appeared in The Twelve: Reformed Done Daily on September 13, 2021. Labor Day was always a melancholy holiday for me as a kid. You know the tune: last day of summer, days getting shorter, return to school, parents getting their work-face on. It was extra painful for me because September …
Continue reading Afghanistan: A 9/11 Postmortem
by Jim Bratt. As prominent evangelical leaders recently gathered at Wheaton, IL, to discuss how the Trump era “has unleashed [a] ‘grotesque caricature’ of their faith,” historian James Bratt weighs in with some thoughts on Christianity and Evangelicalism, and the death (and resurrection) of a movement. This post originally appeared on The Anxious Bench and is re-published with …
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by Jim Bratt. This post originally appeared in The Twelve: Reformed Done Daily on March 12, 2016. The course had come around to the question of religion and the American founding, again. This topic I have taken up a hundred times in various classes, and at three-score more church and community education sessions, but the lesson always bears …
Continue reading Public Virtue
by Jim Bratt. This post originally appeared in The Twelve: Reformed Done Daily on January 15, 2016. Although Martin Luther King’s birthday was actually yesterday, the United States will mark the occasion next Monday. Once more we’ll hear the familiar quotations rehearsed in respectful tones. We’ll see footage from the “I have a dream!” speech on the …
Continue reading Let Us Now Quote Famous Men
The blog has been on hiatus for the summer. Most of the department faculty have been away on research trips or vacation, or buried deep in research. Summer is also a good time to catch up on reading, though; over the next few weeks, we'll be featuring brief recommendations on great books and articles that …
Continue reading Summer Reading: On Politics and Puritans
Historical Horizons 