Abstract
Any discussion of Green's Christian Historiography needs to take this institutional background into account, as a factor that flavors and enriches the kind of discourse that the book exemplifies.1 Reading it, I'm reminded of Alasdair MacIntyre's argument in his 1987 Gifford Lectures, later published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, that coherent moral inquiry must be grounded in the particularities and traditions of a distinct and coherent moral community.2 The virtues of Jay's book owe a great deal to the extent to which Covenant College embodies that ideal, and to the degree to which Jay has embraced it. [...]don't miss Green's footnotes, which overflow with interesting nuggets.) The reader is left with a sense of this discourse as itself emblematic of a special kind of moral community, and Green has set an inclusive table which makes room for all its participants-even making a bit of room for providentialism, the "crazy old uncle" who always shows up at the family gatherings to cause trouble and embarrass all the younger folks. In other words, the Christian faith equips them to appreciate both the value of conventional standards of evidence-gathering and proof, and their inherent limitations-and to hold these complementary but conflicting insights in balance. A religion that asks its adherents to walk by faith and not sight, and to order their lives around revelations and events that occurred at least two millennia ago, is a religion that places an enormous value upon the authority of the past. Schweiger articulates a poignant tension between her professional obligations to her colleagues and her deeper sense of moral obligation to her subjects, an obligation that ultimately is grounded in her love for them.3 Margaret Bendroth's stunningly beautiful 2013 book The Spiritual Practice of Remembering develops this insight even further, drawing on her extensive experiences with parish and congregational documents to insist upon the importance of remembering as an act of love, an act honoring the past, and as a spiritual discipline that draws us toward a fuller apprehension of the communion of saints of which all Christians are a part.4 It seems the historian may have a vocation that is at odds with her profession-a vocation that demands a more capacious sense of the past than "the profession" allows.