Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs (RIHA) Exploring the Role of Religion in the Origins of Novelty and the Diffusion of Innovation in the Progress of Civilizations

Religion and Innovation: Naturalism, Scientific Progress, and Secularization

Protestantism? Reflections in Advance of the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation ($75,000). Gordon College. PIs: Thomas Albert Howard (Gordon College) and Mark A. Noll (University of Notre Dame)

With an eye on the approaching quincentennial, of the Protestant Reformation, the project has engaged in a fundamental inquiry into the historical significance of Protestantism, its heterogeneous trajectories of influence, and their relationship to forces of social innovation, political development, and religious change in the modern West and across the globe. The quincentennial of the Protestant Reformation in 2017 will bring into public view longstanding scholarly debates, interpretations and their revisions—along with lingering confessional animosities and more recent ecumenical overtures. For Western Christianity, a moment of historical recollection on this scale has not presented itself in recent memory. Acts of commemoration can be enlisted to reflect, shape, and introduce novel forces into history. They were not simply conduits or transmitters of the old, but definers and harbingers of the new. In this sense, we might view the past commemorations of the Reformation as being not unlike the sixteenth-century Reformation itself: a series of acts motivated by the desire of retrieval and restoration that, in the final analysis, left a legacy of profound change, disruption, and innovation in human history.

Major Outputs: Books: • Howard, Thomas Albert. The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (accepted, Oxford University Press) • Howard, Thomas A. The Reformation and Social Memory: An Essay on the Meaning of Protestantism (manuscript in progress) • Howard, Thomas Albert and Mark A. Noll, eds. Protestantism after 500 Years (manuscript in progress) • Noll, Mark A. Protestantism’s Revolutionary Idea: Sola Scriptura and the Chaotic Coherence of Protestant History (manuscript in progress) Article: • Howard, Thomas & Mark A. Noll. “The Reformation Approaching 500,” First Things (forthcoming). Conference: • Protestantism? Reflections in Advance of the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, 1517-2017, Gordon College, November 14-16, 2013. Presentations: • Howard, Thomas A. Keynote Lecture: on Reformation commemorations in 1917, Theology, Culture, and World War I Conference, Oxford University, September 2014

• Howard, Thomas A. “Remembering the Reformation: Commemorating the Religious Past as Agent and Mirror of Social Change,” Conference on Faith & History/American Historical Association Meeting Presentation (invited; for January 2016 meeting in Atlanta)

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