History Commons^™

Review: 'Hero Of The Heartland: Billy Sunday And The Transformation Of American Society, 1862-1935', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

It is hard to imagine how anyone could write a boring book about the colorful evangelist Billy Sunday. Robert Martin does not disappoint. The University of Northern Iowa historian tells a lively and well-researched story about Sunday's Iowa childhood—his father's untimely death, his family's grinding poverty, his mother abandoning him to an orphanage—as well as his career as a major league baseball player, his conversion at a Chicago mission and his marriage to Helen (Nell), his remarkable success as an entrepreneurial evangelist, and his failures as a father. In all this Martin convincingly depicts Sunday as the quintessential Midwesterner and …

Fundamentalism, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In America fundamentalism is a movement within Protestantism that was organized immediately after World War I in opposition to "modernism," which included liberal theology primarily, and also Darwinism and secularism. A subgroup of evangelicalism, fundamentalism staunchly affirmed with evangelicals "fundamentals of the faith," including the deity of Christ, his virgin birth, his bodily resurrection, and his substitutionary atonement. What distinguishes fundamentalists from other evangelicals is their strident opposition to modernism. They are, to quote George Marsden, "militant anti-modernist evangelicals."

Protestantism And Fundamentalism, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

The term "fundamentalism" has been used to describe a host of religious movements across the globe that are militantly antimodernist, aggressively patriarchal, literalist in their reading of sacred texts, and assiduous in their efforts to draw boundaries between themselves and outsiders. While "Islamic fundamentalism" has received the most attention, particularly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, scholars and journalists have also applied the term to movements within such disparate traditions as Judaism, Sikhism, and Hinduism, as well as to various Christian groups.

There are benefits to understanding fundamentalism as a global movement that grows out of deep-seated and intense …