Christian History articles from February 2000

Christian History archives from February 2000

FROM THE READERS.
February 1, 2000... I read your article "Exorcizing the Desert" (page 18), and I thought it was offensive. What do the carnal imaginations of monks have to do with Christianity? We are not to hide from the world in a monastic cloister. Jesus did say, "I pray not...

Visionary Years.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... It was an ambitious and sometimes tragic century in which Christians lived out the gospel. United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky said in a recent interview, "The history of my century is a history in which the visionary has repeatedly...

Billy Graham.
February 1, 2000... As an evangelist he has preached to millions; as an evangelical he put a movement on the map. The litany of accomplishments is familiar. Billy Graham has preached the gospel of Christ in person to more than 80 million people and to...

William Seymour.
February 1, 2000... What scoffers viewed as a "weird babble of tongues" became a world phenomenon after his Los Angeles revival. Of all the outstanding black American religious leaders in the twentieth century, one of the least recognized is William Seymour,...

Mother Teresa.
February 1, 2000... She stirred a generation by touching the untouchables. Mother Teresa belongs to the whole world--not to Roman Catholics only, not to Christians only. Indeed, she is the first religious figure in history to be revered during her lifetime by...

Karl Barth.
February 1, 2000... He revived orthodoxy when mere moralism and humanism had seemingly won over the theological world. "The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths." Karl Barth (pronounced "bart") not only...

C.S. Lewis.
February 1, 2000... The atheist scholar who became an Anglican, an apologist, and a "patron saint" of Christians everywhere. "He was a heavily built man who looked about forty, with a fleshy oval face and a ruddy complexion. His black hair had retreated from...

John XXIII.
February 1, 2000... Elected to be a caretaker pope, he decided instead to revolutionize Catholicism. Angelo Guiseppe Roncalli began his life in 1881 as the son of farmers so poor they shared the first floor of their house in Bergamo, near Milan, with six...

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
February 1, 2000... The high school physics-teacher-turned-novelist whose writings shook an empire A high school teacher in his hovel far from home spends every spare minute writing--and then burying the manuscripts in jars. Who could have guessed that he was...

John Paul II.
February 1, 2000... In issuing more significant encyclicals and visiting more nations than any other pope in history, he's shown that Christianity remains a world force. In October, 1978, Karol Wojtyla, the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, Poland, was elected...

John R. Mott.
February 1, 2000... Evangelist and ecumenist. As John Mott stood before the now famous 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference, he said, "It is a startling and solemnizing fact that even as late as the twentieth century, the Great Command of Jesus Christ to...

Martin Luther King, Jr.
February 1, 2000... No Christian played a more prominent role in the century's most significant social justice movement than Martin Luther King, Jr. "We must keep God in the forefront. Let us be Christian in all our actions." So spoke the newly elected...

Rumblings to the South.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... In Africa and elsewhere, third-world Christians are shaking society. Late in 1913 a barefoot figure carrying cross, calabash, and Bible crossed the frontier from Liberia to the Ivory Coast and began the most effective evangelistic crusade...

What Do You Think?
February 1, 2000... How our scholars and general readers voted in the "Most Influential Christians of the Century" survey. One year ago, we asked you, our readers, to do two things: list the five most influential Christians of the twentieth century and then...

The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century.
February 1, 2000... The biggest challenge when researching prominent figures from recent history isn't finding information, but deciding which of the numerous resources to concentrate on. We found these to be most helpful in preparing this issue. Karl Barth...