In the Puritan Reformed Journal: Willem van Vlastuin and Kelly M. Kapic (eds), John Owen between orthodoxy and modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2019), xiv+258 pp. This golden age of John Owen scholarship shows no sign of coming to an end. Recent monographs by Tim Cooper, Ryan McGraw, John Tweeddale, and Martyn Cowan, among others, have demonstrated…
J. N. Darby on “In our Time”
This week's episode of BBC Radio 4's "In our Time" had as its subject J. N. Darby and his dispensational premillennialism. Click here for a discussion between Melvyn Bragg, Nicholas Guyatt, Elizabeth Phillips and myself.
Where is John Owen’s legacy?
A thought experiment, once more on the question of whether Owen made a "distinctive and enduring contribution to English or Reformed theology.” One way to test whether Owen's contribution was "distinctive and enduring" is to ask which kind of church he would attend next Sunday. Maybe the easiest way to form that experiment is to…
Owen in the eyes of his defenders
From A vindication of the late reverend and learned John Owen D. D. (1684), pp. 37-38.
Thinking about the future of Owen studies
I've been prompted to think more about the future of Owen studies after reading Ryan McGraw's second thoughts on my John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of defeat (2016). Ryan belongs to that tiny band of Owen scholars who have published more than one book on their subject. Not many Owen scholars can match Ryan's knowledge of…
Announcing … Cultures of Calvinism in early modern Europe (OUP, 2020)
Scholars have associated Calvinism with print and literary cultures, with republican, liberal, and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, enlightened cultures, cultures of social discipline, secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Reflecting on these arguments, the essays in this volume recognize that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform…
Welcome
Thanks for stopping by. I'm a professor of history at Queen's University Belfast, and I write about history, culture and religion in early modern Britain, where I have special interests in John Owen and J. N. Darby, and in the modern United States of America, where I am mainly interested in evangelicals. When I'm not…
Bibliography: Gribben, “The experience of dissent: John Owen and Congregational life in revolutionary and Restoration England”
From Crawford Gribben, "The experience of dissent: John Owen and Congregational life in revolutionary and Restoration England", in Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb (eds), Church life: Pastors, congregations, and the experience of dissent in seventeenth-century England (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 119-35. ‘Christ hath instituted a beautiful order in his church, if it were…
John Owen and the end of the English republic in “History Today”
From my article in the October 2018 issue of History Today: By the early months of 1658, the young English republic was in crisis. Nine years earlier, after a decade of civil war and three years of famine, leaders in the New Model Army had, as the poet Andrew Marvell later put it, ruined ‘the great…
Owen research in Belfast
Why pursue PhD work on John Owen in Belfast? Relevant supervisors: Crawford Gribben (Queen's University Belfast) and Martyn Cowan (Union Theological College) have both published books on Owen. Relevant archives: Alongside first editions of works by Baxter, Hobbes, Milton etc., Queen's Special Collections unit has copies of such items as The doctrine of the saints perseverance…
