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Arissa H. Oh   International adoption is in the news almost daily, but its numbers are in decline and the tone of the conversation around it has darkened. Celebrity adoptions and heartwarming stories of orphans finding "forever families" in the U.S. have given way to more  skeptical coverage that emphasizes the underside of international adoption : the profit motive that leads to illicit practices and the lack of regulation and oversight in a vast system that shuffles children around the world. The American evangelical crusade for international adoption has received particularly sustained attention . Since the middle of the last decade, evangelical churches and organizations have encouraged their members to adopt children from abroad, often providing funds to help with the high costs. They have promoted a culture of adoption by publicizing a “global orphan crisis,” a disputed concept in itself. Children—many not actually orphans—are adop...

Steven Cromack What was life like for those living during the time of Martin Luther? Is Western Civilization on the eve of another Reformation? Modern society certainly indicates, at the very least, that people are speaking up and speaking out. In the United Kingdom a rapidly increasing number of people are flocking to the “emerging churches.” Led by people like Peter Rollins ( How [Not] to Speak of God ) and other renegade pastors, these “churches” meet in bars, at skate parks, and other profane places. The theology of the emerging church takes a postmodern approach to Christianity and conceives that institutional churches have lost the true meaning of the Christian faith because people are too focused on following prescribed, meaningless rituals. Instead, emerging Christians sit together and read the Gospels and talk about Jesus the Christ. Across the Atlantic in the United States, scholars, theologians, journalists, and ordinary people are launching their own assault on mainstream C...

Randall Stephens [Cross-posted from Religion in American History ] Life magazine, June 30, 1972 Larry Eskridge is Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and editor of the Evangelical Studies Bulletin at Wheaton College.  With Mark Noll, he was co-editor of More Money, More Ministry: Evangelicals and Money in Recent North American History (Eerdmans, 2000).  Eskridge has also written the definitive account of one of the most significant mass religious movements of the last century.  His God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford University Press, 2013) examines the fusion of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity that burst onto the scene in the late 1960s. I recently caught up with Larry to ask him about the project, his research, and more. Randall Stephens: What first got you interested in the topic of the Jesus People? Larry Eskridge: I found the Jesus People an interesting topic at several le...

Conducted by Randall Stephens W. Jason Wallace is a professor of history at Samford University . He is the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame University Press, 2010). I recently caught up with Jason to ask him some questions about his work on Christianity in pre-Civil War America and to discuss some of the Wall Street, 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. connections between religion, politics, and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century U.S. Randall Stephens: What makes the era between 1835 and 1860 such a critical period in American religious history? W. Jason Wallace: Between 1835 and 1860 most aspects of American social, political, and economic life reached something of a ferment.  Religion, and especially Christianity, underwent substantial trials as well.  Religious disestablishment was then, and still is, a young phenomenon in the scope of world history.  Unlike European churches, A...