Tag: John Wesley

The Women Beyond Wesley

This review by Alex Joyner was published on the great Englewood Review of Books site and is republished here with permission. Even today, if you visit the website for Cokesbury, United Methodism’s venerable bookseller, you’ll see an image that has shaped Methodist perceptions of their heritage. It’s a circuit riding preacher on horseback reading a…

12 May 2021
What’s It Going to Take to Fix and Free the UMC?

Warning: United Methodist inside baseball ahead. One of the strongest selling points for the One Church Plan, (and one that I’ve made), is that it takes off the table the contentious, divisive debate over LGBTQ inclusion and allows us to focus on making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world—the stated mission…

16 December 2018
Georgia on his Mind: George Whitefield and the Margins of Empire [from Englewood Review]

This review originally appeared on the Englewood Review of Books. Experiments flourish on the margins. It’s why visionaries and mavericks gather in places far from the watchful eye of social convention and official control. Think Donald Judd making his art and his mark in Marfa in ultra-West Texas. Think Brigham Young and the Mormons building…

16 November 2018
Eating Spinach with Mr. Wesley

One of my great unfinished reading projects is The Works of John Wesley. A long row of books from the series lines one of my shelves these days holding the collected works of the principal founder of Methodism including sermons, journal entries, and minutes of the first conferences. This week I received Volume 32: Medical…

9 October 2018
Jeff Sessions and the Things Church Trials Can’t Do

Church trials don’t create community; they create tribes. And that’s got me concerned for The United Methodist Church. Some 640 United Methodists recently lodged a formal complaint against the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions, who is a United Methodist with membership in a Mobile, Alabama church. Though it is almost so rare…

26 June 2018
A Quick Reminder of Why Wesley Still Matters

John Wesley has been claimed by so many different heirs and used to so many and varied ends that it is refreshing to have someone like Hal Knight come along and point us back to the source. John Wesley: Optimist of Grace, his new entry in the Cascade Companions series designed for nonspecialist readers, comes…

24 June 2018
Jarena Lee and the Day the Preacher Stumbled: Exhortation and the Methodist Future

The preacher was in trouble. It’s hard to take the life out of the story of Jonah, but somehow he had. Struggling preachers are not unusual. We’ve all had a Sunday. Or several. But in early 19th-century Methodism, including the AME branch of Methodism, (of which this preacher was a part), the official preachers had…

13 June 2018
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Reformation(s)

For many years, I taught Reformation history as part of the Course of Study School at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas. I didn’t want the course. My interests were medieval and contemporary, not the stodgy theological arguments of Luther and Calvin. But there was a year when the regular faculty member couldn’t teach it. …

1 November 2017
The Last Thing I Want to Talk About – Bishop Oliveto and the UMC

The last thing I want to talk about is the United Methodist Church’s legal wrangling around the election of Bishop Karen Oliveto, who came to her office last year as a lesbian pastor in a same-sex marriage. Last week the Judicial Council of the denomination ruled that her consecration as bishop was carried out in…

2 May 2017