s brent plate

I am 12, lying in a sleeping bag on the floor of a friend’s house. It’s dark. It’s late. My friend and I are talking, not about girls or ghosts or standard middle school matters, but about the end of the world. The End.

As young evangelicals in the 1970s, we’d been raised in this language, steeped in the scenarios of all hell breaking loose, war, famine, the rise of the Antichrist, the return of Jesus, suffering, and the millennial reign. The stories were told in Sunday school, in the movies we watched, even in the “nonfiction” books lying around our families’ houses. It wasn’t a matter of if but when, and we both agreed The End would arrive in our lifetimes. Maybe even before the end of the school year.

[Read the rest at Killing the Buddha]

The first great social space in the United States was not Boston Common, William Penn’s Philadelphia squares or L’Enfant’s great avenues of Washington, D.C. It was an artificial river, 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide, cutting across New York state.

Like the Silk Road in Asia, the Erie Canal not only established physical links across geographic regions, it also remade the social and religious lives of everyone it touched. Albany newspapers, Genesee flour, Syracuse salt and Western timber traveled on the canal alongside theater groups, former slaves, tourists, industrialists and religious revivalists.

[Read the rest at Religion News Service]