Finney, the Burned-Over District, and a Day in Northeast Ohio

I was in Oberlin, Ohio recently. Every once in a blue moon, we take a trip over to Cleveland, and I've been meaning to do the little side-trip over to Oberlin for years. I'm not fan of Charles Finney but (like him or not) his influence on American Church history has been nothing less than profound.

Recent Discussion of the Salem Witch Trials

https://reformedforum.org/podcasts/ctc907/

https://churchandfamilylife.com/podcasts/scripture-applied/681b88f593d37c3f67415b85

Regarding the Salem Witch Trials of 1692/93, it was evident early on that the host of the show was not familiar with the subject when he raised the question of whether Britain had its witch episodes as well. I guess he's never heard of Matthew Hopkins (d.1647).

The 17th century represented probably the height of the witch craze in the Western world. Many wrongly think of the Middle Ages when it comes to witches. Most of the episodes actually occur in the post-Renaissance context and the phenomenon seemed to equally afflict both Protestant and Roman Catholic circles.

Chiliasm, Totalitarian Cults, and The Pursuit of the Millennium

After many years I finally found the time to read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages first published in 1957. For all the attention this book has received I was quite disappointed.

Cohn's thesis rests on a cobbled together narrative that confuses popular impulse and superstition with religious conviction. He tries to argue that various utopian and chiliastic movements of the medieval period were the cultural and ideological precursors of twentieth century Nazism and Communism.