Author Mark Noll, named one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals by Time magazine, will deliver two lectures on “The Bible in American Public Life” as this year’s Cole lecturer at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Noll will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11 on “The Bible in American Public Life: Dilemmas at the Center, Insights from the Margins.” The following day at 10 a.m., Noll will speak on “The Bible in American Public Life: The Special Case of the King James Version.”
Both lectures are at Benton Chapel on the Vanderbilt campus. They are free and open to the public.
Noll’s books include A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln and The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in which he famously claimed that “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
Publishers Weekly said that The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was “required reading for those seeking to understand the often peculiar relationship between evangelical religion and secular culture.”
Noll, the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, graduated from Wheaton College, where he returned to teach for more than three decades before moving to Notre Dame in 2006. He earned a Ph.D. in religion from Vanderbilt in 1975 and was awarded the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2006.
The Cole Lectures were established in 1892 through a donation by philanthropist Edmund W. Cole, president of the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad and treasurer of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, “for the defense and advocacy of the Christian religion.” Previous Cole lecturers include George Buttrick, Paul Tillich, Jim Wallis and Lamin Sanneh.
Media Contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu