Reorienting English Protestantism

“conservative Protestantism” in the United States

Reorienting the Race Politics Debate

Is race politics about racism, ideology, or group conflict? After decades, this debate seems scarcely closer to resolution, despite the enormous theoretical, empirical, and normative issues at stake. I argue that a misguided approach to interpreting public opinion has stymied the debate. All three theories implicitly try to read a person’s motives for supporting or opposing proposals off of the...

Henry Stubbe, radical Protestantism and the early Enlightenment

last few years by Jetter himself, show hospitals as they now appear. There are also architectural sketches, floorplans from different historical periods, and detailed photographs of stained-glass windows and commemorative crests. In addition, the book contains a sixteen-page historical survey that integrates the accounts of the ten individual hospitals and discusses some of the other important ...

Did Protestantism promote economic prosperity via higher human capital?

This paper investigates the Becker-Woessmann (2009) argument that Protestants were more prosperous in nineteenth-century Prussia because they were more literate, a version of the Weber thesis, and shows that it cannot be sustained. The econometric analysis on which Becker and Woessman based their argument is fundamentally flawed, because their instrumental variable does not satisfy the exclusio...

Reformation Leads to Self-Reliance: The Protestantism of Transcendentalism

This article examines connections between the Protestant Reformation and American literature and argues that Protestantism’s best expression exists in contemporary iterations of self-reliance. The first part focuses on William Ellery Channing’s and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s literary criticism of John Milton, a poet who represents the Protestant ideals these writers combine with American principles ...