Gary B. Nash,"Christ's Militia: How Evangelical Protestantism Came to Dominate American Religion," Boston Review, April/May, attempts to explain how evangelical Protestantism developed such a stronghold in American religion. Nash's argument is particularly strong at the point where I found Christine Heyerman's Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt so weak. That is, you can't account for the strength of evangelical Protestantism in America if, as Heyerman did, you consistently discount the overwhelming conversion of the African American population, slave and free, to it. This is an old discussion at Cliopatria. In fact, it is one of our primary roots, because I was so taken with Tim Burke's"On Ellipses and Theses and Archives," a response to my criticism of Heyerman. Thanks to David Greenberg, guestblogging at Daniel W. Drezner.com for the tip.

Scott McLemee,"The Consecrated Heretic," Inside Higher Ed, 12 May, revisits Jean-Paul Sartre on the 25th anniversary of his death and the centennial of his birth. McLemee has a subtle appreciation for Sartre that I don't have. I think that anyone who, in 1952, claimed that citizens of the Soviet Union were perfectly free to criticize their government was missing something so elemental that I was suspicious of everything else he said. In seminary, I developed almost the same attitude toward Rudolph Bultmann's work in New Testament theology. A German Protestant theologian who failed to join the Confessing Church in Hitler's Germany, I thought, was missing some crucial element of judgment. It caused me to be suspicious of his whole intellectual enterprise.

Consider the possibility of signing Jeff Weintraub's on-line petition in support of the American Association of University Professor's condemnation of the British Association of University Teachers' boycott of the Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan, and blacklisting of their faculty members. Here's an up-dated short list of some of the 3600 people who have signed it. I am joining Jon Wiener of the University of California, Irvine, in asking the executive committees of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians to support the AAUP's position.

News from bloggerdom: Happy first birthday Mr. Sun!. The new and improved Easily Distracted, with comments enabled, is launched and Tim Burke is on the case. Finally, Eugene Volokh has begun posting at the Huffington Post's mass blog. Is that something like having Albert Einstein as a columnist for the New York Post?