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Taking theology seriously
American Grace is the rare sort of book that gratifies and challenges the reader at the same time. Many scholars will be glad to confirm long-standing hunches in the results of the authors’ 2006 and...
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An intended absence? Democracy and The Unintended Reformation
The long-term consequences of the Reformation have been a subject of heated debate for many decades. Most accounts have taken one of two forms. On the one hand, in the wake of Max Weber’s magisterial...
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The return of sacred history
Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation is an expansively ambitious work. Indeed, its aim is to provide nothing less than an “explanation of why the Western world today is as it is.” In this regard...
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Has modernity failed?
Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation is noteworthy for its readiness to tread upon questions of morality and metaphysics that most historians would consider forbidden terrain. It is a common...
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Get over it
In many ways, the argument of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation is a familiar one. Gregory aims to explain our modern condition genealogically, by tracing the “hyperpluralism” of modern...
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Secular supercessionism and alternative modernity
Recent years have seen the resurgence of “metahistories” that seek to provide a single complex narrative of seemingly disparate events and developments. Among the most prominent contemporary accounts...
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Conceptualizing pluralism and consensus in the modern Western world
Without pointing out those places where I agree with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, I would like to add a qualification to his claim that the modern Western world is correctly described as...
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Beyond supersessionist stories?
Brad Gregory’s monumental and erudite book has yielded a wide range of reactions. Highly appreciative remarks (especially from the Catholic side) are countered by rather dismissive, sometimes even...
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History without hermeneutics: Brad Gregory’s unintended modernity
I would like to draw attention to three aspects of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, a book whose courage and ambition I applaud, if for no other reason than that it exemplifies what an...
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Beyond the Catholic-Protestant divide
The epigraph of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation comes from an essay that Jacques Maritain wrote for the Review of Politics in 1942 entitled “The End of Machiavellianism.” In it, Maritain...
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Marriage plots
In his Commonweal essay, “Sex & Christianity: How has the Moral Landscape Changed?” Charles Taylor works to create a space for a Catholic sexual ethic that does not make “a certain kind of purity a...
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Practicing sex, practicing democracy
Why is it that sex is such a central part of American political life anyway? Why, when The New York Times reported on the influence of “values” voters on the 2004 Presidential election, did the Times...
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Sex and the subject of religion
The current campaign within the Archdiocese of New York to canonize the radical activist Dorothy Day (1897-1980) offers a good example of what Elizabeth Povinelli, writing here on December 13 (“Can Sex...
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Genre, method, and assumptions
More than 60 reviews of The Unintended Reformation have appeared since January 2012, including forums in four journals (Historically Speaking, Church History, Catholic Historical Review, Pro Ecclesia),...
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Historical arguments and omissions
A number of the forum reviewers raise objections to various aspects of the historical arguments in The Unintended Reformation. Others criticize me for having neglected what they regard as important...
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Contents and discontents of (post)modernity
The Unintended Reformation is an unusual work of history in deliberately focusing as much on the present as on the past, and in emphasizing the ongoing importance of the Reformation era for...
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Minding hermeneutics and history
Minding the Modern is unusual in several respects. It is organized historically but anti-historicist, methodologically self-aware yet critical of “method,” and reliant on close literary readings while...
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