Author: Fred Sanders

Isaac Watts, born this day (July 17) in 1674, is one of the greatest hymn writers in the English language. Growing up a Dissenter (his father was imprisoned twice for not being Anglican), Watts was not allowed to attend the best colleges. But he received a good education, and turned his considerable skills to pastoring,…

Rembrandt van Rijn was born this day, July 15, in 1606. He is one of those artists whose work seems too good to be true. Seeing a Rembrandt painting in person is always a revelation that even the best photos in books didn’t prepare you for. He could paint the surface of the human face…

July 14, 1833, was the day when John Keble (1792-1866) preached his sermon with the title National Apostasy in St. Mary’s, Oxford. Though it was not recognized as a major event at the time, the sermon was published and distributed, and the events of the next decade would cause historians (following the testimony of John…

Thomas Kelly, born this day (July 13) in 1769, was an evangelical Irish pastor and hymn writer. Though his piety hardly seems outlandish today, in the torpid established church of eighteenth-century Ireland, he was considered too hot to handle and too born-again to put up with. Barred from preaching in the established church, he and…

Thomas Guthrie, born this day (July 12) in 1803, is without a doubt one of the greatest preachers on the topic of social justice in the history of evangelicalism. Guthrie led the movement to establish free schools for the poor in Scotland in the nineteenth century –Ragged Schools, as they were called. As an activist,…

John Quincy Adams (born this day, July 11, in 1767) was a Christian of an unusual kind. Raised to be Unitarian, he tended more to the Calvinist side of Congregationalism. As anti-Trinitarianism became more pronounced among the American political class, Adams clearly distinguished his own complex views about the deity of Christ from what he…

Tomorrow is John Calvin’s quincentennial birthday! He was born July 10, 1509. We’ll have a headline post from Allen Yeh on his legacy. Meanwhile from the archives, some older Scriptorium essays on Calvin: 1. The Reluctant Reformer: How Calvin got bullied into the active ministry. 2. The Terrifying Presbyterian John Calvin Mask. Print it out,…

Stephen Langton, who died on this day (July 9) in 1228, is the man most responsible for putting the chapter divisions into the Bible. Langton was one of the most prominent churchman of the thirteenth century, famous in his own time and chronicled by biographers such as Matthew Paris. He rose from being a popular…

It was on July 8, 1741 that Jonathan Edwards preached the sermon for which he is most famous, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards had already preached a different version of the sermon a month earlier at Northampton, Massachussetts, but he had strengthened the sermon in a number of ways before preaching…