This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mobile, your host and president of the Southern Baptist

Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Matthew Bowman teaches history at Boeing

Green State University. He's the author of The Mormon People, The Making of an American Faith, and he holds the PhD in American history from Georgetown University.

His most recent work is The Urban Pulpit, New York City, and the of Liberal Evangelicalism.

Matthew Bowman, welcome to Thinking in Public.

Professor Bowman, your new book, The Urban Pulpit,

New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangel evangelicalism raises an interesting question just in terms of the subtitle.

I think it would be really important for you to find what you mean by your subtitle.

What is the liberal evangelicalism you're writing about

in this book sure liberal evangelicals are well it's a term I used because they

used it themselves I take the term from Henry Sloane Coffin who was a pastor in New York for many years

president of union theological seminary.

In 1915 he gave a speech called the practical aims of a liberal evangelicalism and what he seems to have

wanted to do he and also I think his fellows who are mostly pastors was to find a middle way, a middle way between this emerging fundamentalist

movement, and they saw over to their right, but also away from an increasingly technocratic progressive movement of social and cultural reformers who

were relying on things like sociology and social work and

I'm Koppen wanted to blend the two to find the sense of social reform of

activism of the relevance of Christianity in the modern world, but also on the other hand to avoid

what Harry Emerson Fosick later called the outworn sectarianism of fundamentalism. They wanted to preserve this vitalizing personal

power of Christ but also make it relevant for the modern world. This was in an America

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