Description

Dr. Mark A. Noll Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History University of Notre Dame Monday, October 19, 2009 7:30 p.m. DeSantis Family Chapel 300 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach, FL "Abraham Lincoln's Moral Development and Lessons for Dangerous Times" Though deeply religious, President Lincoln belonged to no denomination and is considered a “religious enigma.” To commemorate the bicentennial of President Lincoln’s birth, Dr. Noll will discuss the role Lincoln’s faith played in his presidency and the lessons we can learn from his legacy of uniting a nation in turmoil. One of the nation’s foremost scholars of religious and cultural history, Noll is a prominent participant in dialogues between evangelical and Catholic scholars. Selected in 2005 by Time magazine asone of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America, Noll is the author of numerous books, including God and Race in American Politics, which traces the explosive political effects when religion and race intermingle. His book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is about anti-intellectual tendencies within the American evangelical movement and was widely covered in both religious and secular publications. In 2006 Noll was awarded a National Humanities Medal in the Oval Office by PresidentGeorge W. Bush. Prior to joining the University of Notre Dame, Noll was as a professor of religion and history at Wheaton College for 27 years where he co-founded the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. He also served as a visiting teacher at Harvard Divinity School, University of Chicago Divinity School, Westminster Theological Seminary and Regent College of Vancouver, B.C. Noll earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Wheaton College, Illinois, a master’s degree on theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and completed a doctorate at Vanderbilt University specializing in the history of Christianity. Some of his many publications include America's God, from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Is the Reformation Over?, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys, The Old Religion in a New World and, most recently, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith.