I am (all about me) a pretty big fan of Julie and Julia. For one thing, it’s a movie about food and I like to eat. Second, it’s about cooking and I like to cook because I like to eat. For another, it features Meryl Streep as Julia Child, which is a remarkable performance. How many actors have played such various roles?
My affection for the movie has inspired thoughts about a daily blog about one of my different responsibilities. For those who haven’t seen the movie, Julie decides to cook through the all the recipes of (I believe) Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And she blogs virtually daily about the trials and successes of this marathon.
This premise has made me think about blogging my way through Robert Murray McCheyne’s schedule to read the Bible in one year, not just the edification that accompanies reading the word, but also the challenges to schedules, the odd juxtaposition of texts and life’s circumstances, and the failed days which require reading 30 chapters in one weekend before the guests arrive. Another thought is to blog about talk-show radio, to follow the topics and screeds that govern sports-talk shows, Rush Limbaugh, and Phil Hendrie over the course of one year and see what that reveals about the American people.
One other possibility is to blog about the writing of a book, from the stage of drafting a proposal for a contract, through the ups and downs of research and writing, to the soul-enslaving chore of revising and editing. The problem with this idea is that it would give an editor too much information about whether the author is goofing off. It would also give future readers a chance to see the real flaws in the book — such as that point when you cannot nail down the argument but decide on a strategy that let’s you fudge it. If you let on that you didn’t have time to go to the archives for a particular section of the book, the way that Julie admitted she overcooked the beouf bourgignon, then your editor is likely going to make you go to the archives, thus delaying the book and prolonging the blog for another year.
All of this is a long-winded way of mentioning that I turned in what I believe to be the final manuscript for Calvinism: A Global History, which if production schedules go well and if the Lord tarries, should be published next spring by Yale University Press. I have been working on this for almost five years — sometimes in fits and starts — but for the last eighteen months in a concerted way, and it is a great relief to have the manuscript “in the can.” This also means that I have been communing for the last five years in various ways with John T. McNeill, author of The History and Character of Calvinism (1954), and Philip Benedict, whose book Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (2002), broke the mold for studies of Reformed Protestantism. My book is somewhere in between McNeill’s and Benedict’s. Like the former, mine tries to cover the entire range of Reformed communions in various settings since the sixteenth century. Like Benedict, I look at the institutional, political and social history of Calvinism but extend his narrative (in a much less comprehensive way) beyond 1700, where his book stops.
So far, I don’t think I have revealed anything that I haven’t already written for my editor or readers. Nor do I think I have exposed potential weaknesses for reviewers ready to pounce. And to give readers an additional peek into the book, I include an excerpt from the introduction:
Although Calvinism was flagging, Froude, Kuyper, and Beattie were not simply overcompensating with their praise for Reformed Protestantism. Various students of modern societies in the West, with no particular stake in the survival of Calvinism, made similar claims about the faith’s political and economic contributions. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed during his visit to the United States that representative government was the fruit of English Calvinism’s seed. In New England among the Puritans, he wrote, “Democracy more perfect than any of which antiquity had dared to dream sprang full-grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society.” George Bancroft in his History of the United States of America asserted that “the fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty, for in the moral warfare for freedom, his creed was a part of his army, and his most faithful ally in the battle.” Positive appraisals of Calvinism as a generator of a better world were not simply the product of nineteenth-century amateur intellectuals. Max Weber’s argument about the influence of Calvinism on economic productivity became a staple in the analysis of capitalism. Several decades later, Robert K. Merton extended Weber’s analysis to show that Calvinism was decisive in the English scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. These assessments of Calvinism reveal that Froude, Kuyper and Beattie were not delusional. As much as they hoped to inspire, they also employed arguments that many non-Calvinists would have found plausible.
As natural as global assessments have come to students of Calvinism, this book despite its title, Calvinism: A Global History, takes a different outlook. Instead of exploring Calvinism’s contribution to the workings of the modern world, this study takes a modest approach. It examines how a variety of western Christianity that started in opposition to Rome in obscure small cities in central Europe eventually distinguished itself from other forms of Protestantism and established institutional outlets not only across Europe but also in North and South America, Africa, Australia, and Asia. Too much scholarship during the last century has exposed the overdrawn and sometimes faulty analysis of earlier assessments of Calvinism. What is needed now is less an account of Calvinism’s role in the forces of globalization and more a narrative of how Calvinism became a global faith. Reformed Protestantism did indeed circumnavigate the planet. But it did so not by underwriting or inspiring the West’s political and economic forces. Calvinism spread around the globe through unlikely historical developments that perhaps only the sovereign God whom Reformed Protestants worshiped could pretend to control. This book is about how Calvinism became a global faith. As it is, the how of Calvinism’s expansion is key to understanding why.
Old Life 
*lowly history grad student waits anxiously*
In the trenches of university research there are not a few of us who believe Yale University Press to be a somewhat prestigious publisher. Much like Whitefield Media Productions, an up-and-coming, scholarly publisher.
Congratulations, Dr. Hart. “Bam!” You just took your CV and “Kicked it up a notch!” Aw, yeah, babe.
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Ryan, frankly, I don’t feel worthy of YUP (I hope my editor isn’t reading). I can’t believe how many important books in church history they have published over the last several decades. It is a remarkable list.
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D. G. Hart: Ryan, frankly, I don’t feel worthy of YUP (I hope my editor isn’t reading). I can’t believe how many important books in church history they have published over the last several decades. It is a remarkable list.
RS: So do you have a worthy sense as opposed to a love sense? : – )
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Really looking forward to that. It will be a great resource for the church. Nick Basbanes wrote a history of Yale University Press in recent years. I need to buy and read that as well.
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Congratulations DGH, this will be one to buy and read. Assuming it hasn’t got a “library-only” kind of price tag!
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Did you have to brush up on your Dutch to write the book?
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DGH,
I am excited to get a chance to read the new book, from the excerpt you provided, it seems to reflect your contrarian sensibilities quite well, as you seem to dispense with our gilded mythology that Calvinism made the modern world to offer the more complex, and to me the more interesting history of Calvinism.
As for the blogging ideas, they all sound pretty cool – but I would opt for the talk radio concept first, because I think it would be an interesting way to analyze the progression of social and political commentary through the grid of your 2k assumptions. The McCheyne idea would be interesting for different reasons, but it at least would dispel the myth that confessionalists don’t read their Bibles.
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John B., not sure what the price will be but Yale does pretty well at keeping books affordable (especially in paper).
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Erik, What good would Dutch have done? (Kidding.) This was an Anglo-phone project. To go too deep into any one aspect of Reformed Protestantism would have been like pursuing the proverbial rabbit.
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Jed, thanks. If only the Bible had recipes (for food, we know it has them for piety).
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Wow, sounds like a great book (aka another great book I’ll never get around to reading — sorry, I still need to finish Secular Faith!)
As for Julie & Julia, I liked the movie, but was left with a bittersweet aftertaste due to Martha’s dismissal of the project when she learned of it. (see IMDB FAQ)
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Along a similar theme of regular blogging to get through something massive, see also http://dailyconfession.wordpress.com, http://dailywestminster.wordpress.com, and my CO “Thesis Thursday” series on CFW Walther’s Theses on Law & Gospel.
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Typo alert: “As natural as global assessments have become…” ???
But I guess that’s why you sent it to the editor, not the printer.
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I don’t know, Jed. From the excerpt I read it seems like a Whig interpretation of Calvinism to me. Calvinism is the reason for our religious liberty, etc., etc., etc.
On a serious note, Dr. Hart is to be congratulated. I hope this book garners him some AHA street cred. Maybe E. Brooks Holifield will throw a review his way. You know those YUP-published all stick together.
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Off-topic, but check out atheist Thomas Frank’s review of Alvin Plantinga’s “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism” in the new issue of The New York Review of Books. Kind of an amazing review. I read it on their website.
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Ryan,
I am not sure how you are construing this as Whiggish, but I suspect you are kidding:
What is needed now is less an account of Calvinism’s role in the forces of globalization and more a narrative of how Calvinism became a global faith. Reformed Protestantism did indeed circumnavigate the planet. But it did so not by underwriting or inspiring the West’s political and economic forces. Calvinism spread around the globe through unlikely historical developments that perhaps only the sovereign God whom Reformed Protestants worshiped could pretend to control.
Darryl’s propensity to channel Wendell Berry makes me think he is indirectly drawing off of Jeffersonian ideals. As I read his works, they seem to come with more of a brass tacks view of history as a complex phenomena, as opposed to a grandiose view of history that can be interpreted through the lens of a few centralized themes.
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I’m leaning McCheyne. Though blogging through Phil Hendrie broadcasts would be a hoot.
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Erik, a review of Plantinga by Frank (as in What’s Wrong with Kansas?) would have been fetching. As it turns out, the review by Thomas Nagel was worthwhile. Just keeping it real.
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Sean, I too lean toward Phil. It would keep away sanctimony.
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Darryl,
You’d get comments that would parallel the phone calls. Oh wait……………..
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D.G. – That’s funny – especially since I sent an e-mail to Frank about it!
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Erik, let us know if Frank responds.
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Mcheyne and Planting? This really is the cool person’s hangout.
Go read Plantinga, or watch the 70 min talk he gave at Biola (its on YouTube).
I need to go back on time out. No more comments from me 🙂
PS Dolezal I critical of plantinga. Why do I always think of bananas after a comment like this…
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