This past weekend, for the first time ever, I attended a Renaissance Faire. At one point, among the many costumes, decorations, songs, and comedy shows, I observed to my wife that the event is really just an opportunity for people to be weird. I meant this in a good way; it’s good for people to gather with a chance to laugh, sing, and dress up without fear of judgment.
In a place like the Faire, I think historical nostalgia is at its best: coupled with silliness. It’s when we get so serious about nostalgia that I get worried, whether in the political sphere (lionizing our nation’s founders and venerating their every word) or the religious (obsessing over how the early church did things or what Martin Luther thought about ______). Perhaps I’m just an optimist, but I like to think that each generation—studying history and learning from it—has the chance to improve on the work of those who went before us, to discern what God is doing now and to help create a new world.
Writers for the Century seem very attuned to the ways our past moves us into our future. Brad East reviews a Mark Noll book that critiques old readings of the Bible that shaped our nation—and calls for new ones. Jonathan Tran reflects on Stanley Hauerwas’s The Peaceable Kingdom and the wisdom it offers us today, 40 years after it was written. CC news editor Dawn Araujo-Hawkins provides an in-depth report of the faith leaders whose activism helped safeguard abortion access one year ago in Kansas. Plus plenty more below.
Email me: What is your weirdest or silliest hobby/interest?
“Mark Noll’s life’s work is one long refusal to let any American myths, above all about the Bible and evangelicals, go unquestioned. That refusal is on erudite display in this book.”
“Every political cause wants to see itself as just, and this desire tempts self-deception and self-righteousness. These temptations only get worse once you throw God into the mix.”
“In what is thought to be Kansas’s highest-ever voter turnout for a primary election, 59 percent of voters said they wanted to keep abortion as a constitutionally protected right—thanks in no small part to local organizing efforts that included or were led by Kansas clergy.”
“Oh, then, on that spontaneous, light-filled day, the world
will begin singing again after our dim, silent millennial waiting—
—you and me and every one of us. . . .”
