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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 In the coming week the April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking will be posted to the Project Muse site.  Subscribers can expect it soon in mailboxes.  The issue includes essays on environmental history, ancient religion, teaching, and Harry Truman. It also features interviews with Matthew Bowman on Mormonism in American history, John R. Gillis on seacoasts in history, and turning points of World War I with Ian F.W. Beckett.  In addition the April issue includes a lively forum on "Scientific Culture in the Modern Era" with intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney).  "One of the most distinctive features of Western culture since the 17th century is the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones," writes Gaukroger in his lead essay. "A particular image of the role and aims of scientific understanding is tied up in a very fundamental way with the self-image of Western modernity. One striking illu...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation.  This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar. The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Con...