Dr. Timothy Larsen writes about serious, energetic faith in the places other historians assume the faith cannot really be. A Victorian Christian fantasist. A Westminster canon who quietly set aside biblical authority. And, in his newest and most acclaimed book, seventeen Anglican chaplains who came out of the trenches of World War I as radicals. Tim is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and the 2025 president of the American Society of Church History, and this hour is us...
Dr. Timothy Larsen writes about serious, energetic faith in the places other historians assume the faith cannot really be. A Victorian Christian fantasist. A Westminster canon who quietly set aside biblical authority. And, in his newest and most acclaimed book, seventeen Anglican chaplains who came out of the trenches of World War I as radicals. Tim is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and the 2025 president of the American Society of Church History, and this hour is us moving through three of his books at once. The Fires of Moloch takes its title from H. G. Wells's line describing Britain sending its sons into the fires of a false god during the Passchendaele Offensive. George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles takes the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish theological turn from the Age of Atonement to the Age of the Incarnation and shows what happens when a rigorously Calvinist minister-turned-fantasy-writer decides doubt is the door in, and therefore the door out, of a mature faith. Every Leaf, Line, and Letter returns to Tim's PhD supervisor David Bebbington's famous quadrilateral for defining evangelicalism and asks what it takes to keep that word doing honest work now that polls will code Muslim Trump voters as evangelical. Come for Anglo-Catholic sacramental confession as battle-tested ministry. Stay for the George MacDonald grandmother who burned her son's violin because he enjoyed music too much.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Dr. Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College, an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 2025 he served as President of the American Society of Church History. He has authored or edited more than twenty books.
Books at the center of this conversation: The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One; George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment ; and Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present.
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