Author: Brian Bolton

In his favorable review of The Jefferson Bible: A Biography by Peter Manseau, Rob Boston notes with approval that Manseau “holds Jefferson to account for one of his most disturbing inconsistencies” (Church & State, November 2020, 19–20). Boston specifies this inconsistency: Thomas Jefferson seemed to admire Jesus’s morals while enjoying a comfortable life built on …

Christian Theological Background Christian theologians from Catholic and mainstream Protestant traditions have addressed the subject of ethical responsibility toward animals since the Middle Ages. Although he was not the first, Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) is the best-known patron saint of animals. For those interested, an excellent review of the role of animals in Christian …

Attempts to acknowledge Christianity as the official religion of the United States date back to the founding constitutional convention and have erupted at regular intervals for the past two hundred years. The current onslaught was initiated by pseudo-historian David Barton in the late 1980s and continues to this day under the banner of Project Blitz, …

Fundamentalism emerged from respectable traditions of revivalism and evangelicalism in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and quickly acquired a thoroughly independent identity. Specifically, fundamentalism was a reaction to liberal Protestant theology, which was attempting to accommodate Christianity to scientific, intellectual, and theological developments occurring at the time. The doctrinal foundation of fundamentalism was …

In 1982, a young cardiologist at the San Francisco General Medical Center named Randolph Byrd had a brilliant insight that would motivate several important investigations of prayer during the following two decades. He realized that the standard research paradigm known as the double-blind randomized clinical trial could be used to test the efficacy of intercessory …