Christian History Institute

Conquest or conversion?

In the hot, steamy air of a mid-September day in 1899, William Henry Sheppard walked into the center of a burned and deserted village in the Belgian Congo. He was drawn there by news of atrocities committed by local Congolese against their fellow Africans, urged on by Belgian imperial authorities.

Near the village’s stockade, the smell of decaying human flesh nearly knocked him over. Inside he discovered 81 severed human hands. The murderers had left them behind but had intended to deliver them to imperial officials as evidence that the...

Eating bread with widows and orphans

JOHN WILSON (1837–1915) was nothing but a coal miner in Durham, England, with a hangover—until the day the Primitive Methodists came to his home. Two elderly fellow miners from this conservative branch of Methodism knocked on his door as they went to work. Years later, historian Stephen Hatcher wrote of that fateful day, “They did not reproach him for his hangover, but saw the potential within him, and engaged him in work at the chapel. From that day on he was a changed man.”
Following his conversion, Wilson began to teach Sunday school and...

Brothers and Sisters of Charity

"At the time being, the condition of the working classes is the pressing question of the hour.”

It was not Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, or even Karl Marx who penned that sentence. It was Pope Leo XIII in “On Capital and Labor” (Rerum Novarum, 1891), an encyclical (papal letter) inaugurating a series of documents we now refer to as “modern Catholic social teaching.” As industrialization and urbanization came to the Christian West, the churches of Europe and the Americas felt compelled to respond to the new problems of an industrial...

The life and times of John Bascom

FEW LIBERAL DEMOCRATS of President Obama’s first term possessed as much power and political savvy as former congressman David Obey. In the secular political world, he was the principal architect of the federal stimulus package, and he chaired the session of Congress that voted to enact the controversial health-care plan known as “Obamacare.”

Perhaps less well known in that secular political world is that Obey believed his actions were rooted not in secular political philosophy but in the religious traditions of his native Wisconsin. He...

Wealth, socialism, and Jesus

“I believe in God, the Master most mighty, stirrer-up of Heaven and earth. And in Jesus, the Carpenter of Nazareth, born of the proletarian Mary, toiled at the work bench, descended into labor’s hell, suffered under Roman tyranny at the hands of Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. The power not of ourselves which makes for freedom, he rose again from the dead to be lord of the democratic advance, sworn foe of stagnancy, maker of folk upheavals. I believe in work, the self-respecting toiler, the holiness of beauty, freeborn...

Become Completely as Fire

A MONASTIC ASKED AN ELDER, “What good work is there that I should do?” And he said to him, “Are not all works equal? Scripture says that Abraham was hospitable, and God was with him. And Elijah loved contemplative silence, and God was with him. And David was humble, and God was with him. So whatever you see your soul desire in accordance with God, do that, and maintain interior watchfulness.”  (Early monastic story) 

While early Christians from Syria, Palestine, and Cappadocia (in modern Turkey) made significant contributions to the...