I know I promised to finish up some reflections on Harriet Beecher Stowe and Calvinism this week, but yesterday’s 50th-anniversary commemoration of Martin Luther King’s

Late summer means slogging through tasks you signed up for under fairer prospects and distant deadlines. For me that means writing an essay on the

  My mind keeps circling back to Trayvon Martin—not to the person, admittedly, nor to the trial with its outrageous verdict. But to the Stand

On the road yet again this week, this time in St. Louis for a conference on early American history. On the way down we stopped

Every decade probably gets The Great Gatsby it deserves. The 1920s found the novel to be less telling a revelation of itself than author F.

        As you outlanders might have noticed, the bloggers at this site who live in the upper Midwest have been musing out loud (it’s not

I’ve been trying to figure out which deaths count and which don’t—not in the eyes of God, of course, but in those of the American

Good Friday when I was young was a day for bargaining. Not just between the pulpit and my ear, as I tried to do the