YERXA ORGANIZES LONDON CONFERENCE ON
ABOLITIONISM AND MORAL PROGRESS
 In his capacity as
assistant director of the Historical Society, ENC history professor
Donald Yerxa secured a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to run
a conference on "British Abolitionism, Moral Progress, and Big
Questions in History" in London on April 26-28, 2007. Sixteen prominent
historians gathered to discuss whether the example of British
abolitionism offers lessons to historians on moral progress and human
betterment. The conference began with a public lecture
at London's Central Hall Westminster (formerly the headquarters of
the UK Methodist Church and directly opposite Westminster Abbey) by the
world's leading historian of slavery David Brion Davis of Yale
University. Davis's lecture was the subject of a Washington Post column
by Michael Gerson. In addition to Davis, other participants included
Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Tufts/University of London), Jeremy
Black (University of Exeter), Eamon Duffy (University of Cambridge),
Peter Harrison (Oxford University) David Hempton (Harvard Divinity
School), Wilfred McClay (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga),
George Marsden (University of Notre Dame), and Lamin Sanneh (Yale
University).
PROFESSOR CARLA
LOVETT ORGANIZES NATIONAL CFH STUDENT CONFERENCE
 Carla Lovett
served as program coordinator for the 2006 Conference on Faith &
History Undergraduate Conference in September 2006 at Oklahoma Baptist
University in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Her two years spent in planning
the conference were rewarded with the largest attendance to date – 42
student papers and over 200 in attendance.
In addition, Lovett delivered an enthusiastically-received opening
plenary talk entitled “Decisions, Mentors, Influences, and Work:
Becoming a Christian Historian,” which both humorously and poignantly
chronicled her career to date as a young historian. (Read
Lovett's talk.)
A number of faculty and student particpants at the 2006 conference
praised Lovett's diligent work, which made the event such a success.
PROFESSOR
STEPHENS PRESENTS PAPERS IN ENGLAND AND
ADVISES NEW EVANGELICAL STUDIES CENTRE
Professor Stephens
was invited to give an American
Studies lecture at the University of Manchester,
the largest university in the UK, with roughly 40,000 students.
Its
American Studies Program was the first to be established in
England.
He also participated in an American Studies graduate seminar while
there and discussed some of his work with graduate students. His
multimedia  lecture,
“Religion in American History and Culture: The Pentecostal Example,”
looked at recent developments in the field of American religious
history and offered reasons why religion is still not incorporated into
the larger narrative of American history. His research on American
pentecostalism served as a case study. The presentation was very well
received and produced some thoughtful discussion.
Stephens also spent some time in Manchester consulting Brian Ward,
chaired Professor of American Studies, on a new Evangelical Studies
Centre (ESC) at U. Manchester. Stephens has been made a board
member
of the center. He offered advice on publications to purchase,
major
scholars in the field to invite for future lectures, and other, similar
centers in the U.S., which might serve as a guide. In fall 2007
the
ESC will be hosting Notre Dame historian Mark Noll.
Following his visit in Manchester, Stephens traveled to the Midlands to
participate in the annual conference of the British
Association of American Studies (BAAS),
University of Leicester. The conference drew together scholars from the
U.S., the U. K., Ireland, European nations, and Australia.
Stephens
paper, “Same As It Ever Was? Southern Pentecostalism at 100,” analyzed
the major changes southern pentecostalism has undergone over the
century.
PROFESSOR LOVETT
RECEIVES BOSTON UNIVERSITY'S
HUMANITIES FOUNDATION AWARD
 Professor Carla
Lovett received
Boston University's Edwin
S. and Ruth M. White Prize
for excellence in research and writing in May 2007.
Graduate students
are selected for this award on the basis of faculty recommendations,
overall academic standing, and a writing sample. Her advisor, Dr. David Hempton,
now of Harvard Divinity School, praised Lovett's work and thought she
well deserved the honor. Lovett was one of only three recipients this
year. The prize includes a $2,000 award. Lovett also
received a Graduate
Research Abroad Fellowship from Boston University.
Professor
Lovett and her husband, math Professor Stephen Lovett, led an ENC
student trip to Europe in May 2007. Following that, the Lovetts stayed
in Vienna, where Professor Carla Lovett continued to do research and
writing for her dissertation project.
2006-2007 HISTORY
DEPARTMENT LECTURE SERIES DRAWS DISTINGUISHED
SCHOLARS FROM HARVARD, JOHNS HOPKINS, U. WISCONSIN,
BOSTON U., & TUFTS
Over
the past year, ENC’s History Department brought some of the leading
history scholars of the English-speaking world  to give talks on
campus. With the generous
support of ENC alumni, department chair Donald Yerxa has made the History Lecture
Series into a top-notch program. This year was no
exception. All events in 2006-07 were well-attended by faculty,
students, and local residents.
Kicking off the year was Jeremy Black, professor of history at the
University of Exeter and one of the world’s most prolific academic
historians. He is the author of over sixty books in addition to
over a dozen edited volumes on international relations, military
history, the press, and historical atlases. On October 31st, 2006
he lectured at ENC on the “Politics of James
Bond,” showing how Bond films reflected the changes wrought
by the Cold War. He also revealed some of the basic ways the
series spoke to shifts in gender and social mores.
In February professor Robert A. Orsi gave a public lecture at ENC on
“The Dangerous Imaginations of Catholic Children in Mid-20th Century
U.S.” Orsi, a past president of the American Academy of Religion,
served as the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in
America at Harvard Divinity School until taking a position this fall at
Northwestern University. Orsi’s lecture was based on a larger project
concerning growing up Catholic in the United States in the twentieth
century. (He has conducted hundreds of interview with believers
across the country.) His work raised questions about children’s
distinctive religious experiences and what it has meant to be a person
of faith within specific worlds of religious practice and imagination.
 Also in February
Owen Gingerich, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and
History of Science at Harvard University, spoke on “Proof and
Persuasion: How Galileo Changed the Rules of Science.” Gingerich
examined the intellectual controversy over the Book of Nature versus
the Book of Scripture, novel scientific interpretations versus a highly
literal reading of the Bible.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown
(Richard J. Milbauer Emeritus Professor of History, University of
Florida, and Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University) lectured on
“Honor in the American South and the Middle East” in March 2007.
Wyatt-Brown has been president of the Southern Historical Association
and the Society for Historians of the Early American
Republic.
He has published a number of books on southern history and
literature. His Southern Honor:
Ethics and Behavior in the Old South was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. Southern
novelist
Walker Percy described the book as “A remarkable achievement--a re-creation
of the living reality of the
antebellum South from thousands of bits and pieces of the dead
past.”
At ENC Wyatt-Brown discussed the role honor has played
and continues to play in regional and world crises.
Later in March one of the most recognizable historians in the U.K. Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto (Prince of Asturias Professor in the Department
of History, Tufts University), delivered a lecture on “Amerigo Vespucci
and the Naming of America, 500 Years after.” The event was co-sponsored
by the Historical Society. Fernandex-Armesto also visited professor
Yerxa’s class, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” where students discussed his
book on global exploration, Pathfinders,
with him.
To conclude the season, ENC’s Polkinghorne Society
hosted an “Origins Roundtable.” Participants included: Ronald Numbers
(Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine, University
of Wisconsin-Madison); Jon Roberts (Professor of History, Boston
University); Karl Giberson (Eastern Nazarene College); Donald Yerxa
(Eastern Nazarene College).
Over the summer a range of revered scholars presented their research as
part of the Open
Theology and Science conference held on the ENC
campus. Guest
speakers included Sir John Polkinghorne (former president of Queens
College, Cambridge, and professor of physics), Kenneth
Miller
(Professor of Biology, Brown University), John Haught (Landegger
Distinguished Professor of Theology at Georgetown University).
Plans are now underway for renowned historian of religion, Stephen
Prothero (Religion Department Chair, Boston University) to lecture
at ENC in fall 2007. His recent book, Religious Literacy: What Every American
Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (HarperOne, 2007) is a New York
Times bestseller and has received much attention in the national media.
Prothero has written for the New
York Times, Salon, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal. He has
also commented on religion on television programs such as The Daily
Show with Jon Stewart, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The O'Reilly Factor, and
The Today Show.
See
posters professor Stephens created for the 2006-07 lectures.
TWO ENC
HISTORIANS EDIT BOOK SERIES
 The Historical Society
and the University of South Carolina Press have signed a contract to produce
an eight-volume series, Historians in Conversation, over the next two
years. Each volume will draw selected essays and interviews from the
pages of Historically Speaking
on a variety of themes. ENC history professor and editor of
Historically Speaking Donald Yerxa will edit seven of the volumes and
ENC assistant professor/ Historically Speaking's associate
editor Randall Stephens will also edit a volume. Yerxa and Stephens are
writing introductory chapters for the volumes they edit. By the
beginning of the 2007 Fall Semester, Yerxa will have submitted
manuscripts for four books in the series, including a volume on
military history, historical thinking, the history of Africa and the
Atlantic World, and early American history. Stephens will edit the last
volume in the series, on American religious history. These volumes
include essays and interviews from many of the leading historians in
the English-speaking world.
 Professor Yerxa continued to
publish a number of essays, reviews, and interviews in the 2006-07
academic year. His article, "That Embarrassing
Dream: Big Questions and the Limits of History," appeared in the
Winter/Spring 2007 issue of Fides et
Historia with responses by Ronald Wells and Wilfred McClay. He
wrote a review essay on the Battle
of Guadalcanal for Books &
Culture (January/February 2007). Five of Yerxa's interviews
appeared in various issues of Historically Speaking: Niall
Ferguson (Harvard), David Blackbourn (Harvard), Max Boot (Council on
Foreign Relations), Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Tufts/University
of London), and David Brion Davis (Yale). He has three book reviews
scheduled to appear in the Christian Scholar's Review and Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
and a review essay in Books &
Culture on Admiral Lord Nelson.
PROFESSOR
STEPHENS' SCHOLARSHIP
Professor Stephens
is completing several chapters for edited volumes to be
published by the University of  Kentucky
Press, the University of Alabama Press, the University of South
Carolina Press, the University Press of Florida, Columbia University
Press, and Cambridge University Press. His contributions include
essays on abolitionism and religion in the antebellum South, southern
pentecostalism, the folk revival preacher Sam Jones,
holiness-pentecostalism and John Wesley, sources for American religious
history, and pentecostal historiography. His book on the roots of
holiness and pentecostalism in the U.S. South, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and
Pentecostalism in the American South, will be released by
Harvard University Press in fall 2007.
Stephens and colleague Karl Giberson
have signed a contract with Harvard
University Press for the book they are co-authoring, The Anointed: American Evangelical Experts.
The project will look at conservative Christian leaders, “experts” who
fundamentalists and evangelicals turn to for wisdom concerning:
American history, theology, psychology, and human origins science . .
. In general, Stephens and Giberson hope to answer a couple
of large questions: “Why” and “how” do these individuals gain their
authority, though lacking credentials and opposed by professional
communities. They also hope to shed light on what this says
about contemporary America and the political and cultural divides of
our era. The Anointed has
already received high praise from Grant Wacker (Duke), Ron Numbers (U.
Wisconsin), and John Wilson (editor, Books and Culture).
Harvard UP editor Joyce Seltzer thinks the work will be "an excellent
contribution to public awareness and debate and we look forward to
disseminating it widely."
In 2006 Stephens and Del Case (Music Department) published a piece on
Christian rock in Books and Culture: A Christian Review.
Stephens and Case are
currently working on another review for the magazine. Stephens
has
authored other reviews that will appear in The Journal of Peasant
Studies, Church History: Studies in Christianity
and Culture, and H-SHEAR, the online review of
the Society
for the History of the Early American Republic.
He continues to serve as associate editor of Historically
Speaking. This academic year he published interviews
with College of
William
and Mary historian James P. Horn and Harvard
religious historian Robert Orsi.
Stephens is completing other interviews to be included in subsequent
issues. More recently he has contributed to historian Paul
Harvey's
new blog, Religion in
American History, of which Stephens is a contributing editor.
YERXA
EDITS FORUM FOR THE EUROPEAN REVIEW
& JOINS EDITORIAL
BOARD OF NEW ONLINE JOURNAL
 ENC history
professor Donald Yerxa has been asked to join University of Padua
historian William Shea to edit a forum on the Scientific Revolution for
the European Review, the
interdisciplinary journal of the Academy of Europe. Participants
include H. Floris Cohen (Twente), Peter Harrison (Oxford), John
Heilbron (Oxford/Berkeley), Theodore Rabb (Princeton), and Shea.
Yerxa's essay, "Historical Coherence and Complexity" leads the forum,
which will appear in the fall of 2007.
Professor emeritus Bruce Mazlish (MIT) has invited ENC history
professor Donald Yerxa to join the editorial board of a new online
journal, New Global Studies.
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