Blog

News, events, updates, and tidbits from the Presbyterian Historical Society. Use tags to read related articles or sort by author for similar posts written by PHS staff members and volunteers.

Wabash Valley Hears From 1994 GA

June 12, 2018

"Realizing that they had witnessed a miracle that could bring the church back together, the commissioners stood and applauded, held hands and sang."

The Presbytery of Wabash Valley reported out from General Assembly in its July 1994 newsletter that the June Assembly, in Wichita, Kansas, "experienced a great emotional swing -- from despair and concern to euphoria."

Despair and concern were occasioned by the feminist Re-Imagining Conference of November 1993 in Minneapolis. Wild reports of paganism and heresy...

Author:

David S

Tags:

General Assembly, Wichita, Womens History

Gayraud Wilmore Reflects on Religion and Race

June 11, 2018

We've just published in Pearl's Oral Histories Collection a 1981-1982 interview of Presbyterian civil rights worker Gayraud Wilmore, conducted at Newark Airport and in Rochester, New York by PHS advisory council member and Wilmore's colleague, J. Oscar McCloud.

...

Author:

David S

Tags:

Civil Rights, African American History, Gayraud S. Wilmore

The United Mission in Iraq

May 16, 2018

We've recently processed and put into the hands of researchers RG 509, records of the United Mission in Iraq.

Though individual Protestant missionaries evangelized in Mosul and Kirkuk in the nineteenth century, coordinated American mission work flourished within the postwar British sphere of influence. In 1924 the Presbyterian...

Author:

David S

Tags:

Missions, Iraq, Collections

Fossil Fuels and the General Assembly

May 1, 2018

Quick, what climate change prophet said this and when?

Finding alternatives to fossil fuels gives us the opportunity to realize new forms of community and to express solidarity with the poor and with the rest of creation. Our response to God's call is easily diverted by claims for national supremacy, institutional rigidities, and selfish individualism. We must, therefore, heed the Holy Spirit's working within us, reordering our priorities, bringing us to repentance, and empowering us for participation in the new era.

That was the General Assembly of the United...

Author:

David S

Tags:

General Assembly, Environment

Land of Enchantment

March 29, 2018

On the walls of the office were a painting of a Cuban revolutionary, signed photographs from Presidents of the United States, and stained glass from the street in front of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Dean Lewis, long-serving director of the PC(USA) Advisory Committee on Church and Society, was talking to me about his work with the Presbyterian churches of Cuba -- "Much of what we did was done with the active resistance of the Louisville system" -- but he could have been speaking of almost any episode in a long career of supporting the church in its...

Author:

David S

Tags:

Collections, New Mexico

You are here

Blog

Wabash Valley Hears From 1994 GA

Gayraud Wilmore Reflects on Religion and Race

The United Mission in Iraq

Fossil Fuels and the General Assembly

Land of Enchantment