Cole Lecture

Vanderbilt University Divinity School announces the 2007
Cole Lectures

to be delivered by
Mark A. Noll

The Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History
University of Notre Dame 

Thursday, October 11, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
Friday, October 12, 2007, 10:00 a.m.
Benton Chapel
           

Thursday, October 11, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
“The Bible in American Public Life: Dilemmas at the Center, Insights from the Margins”

Friday, October 12, 2007, 10:00 a.m.
"The Bible in American Public Life: The Special Case of the King James Version"

Noted historian and scholar Mark Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.  Noll was graduated from Wheaton College where he earned the baccalaureate and then began his graduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where he received the master of arts degree.  For his doctoral studies, Noll enrolled in the graduate department of religion at Vanderbilt University.  Upon defending his dissertation titled Church Membership and the American Revolution: An Aspect of Religion and Society in New England from the Revival to the War for Independence, he received the doctorate of philosophy in 1975.  Noll taught at Wheaton College for nearly thirty years before his appointment to Notre Dame in 2006.

A prolific evangelical writer in subjects related to the history of Christianity in the United States, Canada, and the modern world, Noll is the author of Religion and American Politics from the Colonial Period to the Present; The Civil War as a Theological Crisis; The Rise of Evangelicalism:  The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys; Is the Reformation Over?  An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism; and Sing Them Over Again to Me:  Hymns and Hymnbooks in America.  One of his most significant books to American religious history is America’s God, from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, in which he chronicles the history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.  In recognition for his scholarly works, Noll’s was awarded the National Humanities Medal at the White House on November 2006. 

Philanthropist Edmund W. Cole, president of Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad and treasurer of the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust, endowed the annual Cole Lecture Series in 1892 “for the defense and advocacy of the Christian religion.” Cole’s gift provided for the first sustained lectureship in the history of Vanderbilt University.

The lectures have been delivered by such distinguished scholars as Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, Rudolph Bultmann, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Walter Brueggemann, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, James Barr, Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, Edward Farley, Don Beisswenger, Gene TeSelle, David Buttrick, Jim Wallis, and Lamin Sanneh.

The Cole Lectures are free and open to the public.