Barnabas File

I receive a daily e-mai l from   Christian History  magazine citing significant historical events from that particular date.     The magazine is part of the Christianity Today family, so you can expect a rather conservative bent to their material, but what they point out is usually very accurate.     I look at these each day and post (with some editing) on my Facebook page.     They often use the term “greatest” or “most influential” about a person, and I think those terms are always dependent on the larger context, so I usually take those out.       I am often surprised by the responses I receive on these posts. This was one of my posts last week:   May 8, 1845: The Southern Baptist Convention organizes in Augusta, Georgia, separating from the Triennial Convention in order to support the appointment of slaveholders as missionaries.   The post received 71 likes, 26 comments, and 37 shares.  Following the shares w...

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”-- George Santayana Symbols are powerful and it is often difficult to separate them from the meanings originally attached to them. We find ourselves in the midst of great discussion about what we should do with the past, especially how we should handle symbols identified with particular causes.   If we continue to display them, are we espousing the same causes or are we simply acknowledging their role at a particular time in history? How do we deal with historical figures?   They also become symbols rather than people.   Are they one dimensional figures defined by a certain set of actions or are they multi-faceted, flawed human beings who struggled to find clarity in the midst of turbulence? I am a son of the South.   In grade school, we were always reminded that the conflict of 1861-1865 was not “the Civil War” but the “War Between the States.”   We observed Confederate Memoria...

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was the defining moment of my generation. When he was killed in Dallas, I was 20 years old and a junior in college.   During a time of stress in our nation—the Cold War and civil rights, among other things—Kennedy embodied hope and a promise for a better future.   In hindsight, we now know about his flaws including his reluctance to act on crucial issues, his physical illnesses,  and his personal indiscretions. In 1963, however, Kennedy seemed to embody all that was good about America. I have been reading a book entitled What If?   in which leading military historians imagine what might have been if certain military conquests had ended differently.   It is tempting to play the “what if” game with the assassination of John Kennedy. If Kennedy had lived, would we have entered in the quagmire of Vietnam that resulted in the deaths of 60,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands who lived in Southeast Asia?  Many y...

When I was in grade school, our school library had a series of books that told the stories of famous people—everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison and beyond.   Each provided information about the subjects’ formative years, their adult lives, and their impact on other people and society.   Although published in the 1950s, the series was not limited to white American men, but also featured women, Native Americans, and African-Americans.   For the most part these were morality tales that promised if you worked hard and helped others, you would be successful in life.   The perspective might have been rather narrow, but such reading did introduce me to the joy of learning about leaders through reading. Reading biography and autobiography provides significant insight about those who have gone before us--the famous, the infamous, and the obscure.   Such reading gives a ground-level perspective on great national and international movements and often he...

One of the things that I learned as I studied history in college (and as I have continued to read it) is that there is no such thing as an objective historian.  Even the most conscientious scholar brings certain perspectives, presuppositions, and paradigms to his or her research.  This may well determine what the researcher deems important and may either aid or encumber the discoveries made. If this is true of history scholars, it is certainly true of each of us as we think about our own history.  Although our memories may be very vivid, they may not necessarily be accurate.  We usually see only one side of events, even those events that we experienced personally.  Our feelings about people and our place in the world provide the filters through which we see the events of our past.  We also impose interpretations that help us make sense of the past but they are our interpretations. The person who says “This is not the church I grew up in” is not o...