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Listen Now Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Welcome to our Tuesday show! Our host Kerby Anderson will be broadcasting remotely from the GNN Augusta affiliate, station WLPE. To begin, Kerby speaks with Thomas Albert Howard about politics, history, religion, and his book, Broken Altars. In the second hour, he updates us on the, the , and more.
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Kerby Anderson
Host, Point of View Radio Talk Show
Kerby Anderson is host of Point of View Radio Talk Show and also serves as the President of Probe Ministries. He holds masters degrees from Yale University (science) and Georgetown University (government). He also serves as a visiting professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and has spoken on dozens of university campuses including University of Michigan, Vanderbilt University, Princeton University, Johns HopkinsRead More
Guests
Thomas Albert Howard
Author | Professor of Humanities and History - Valparaiso University
Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard (Ph.D, University of Virginia) is professor of humanities and history and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University, where he is affiliated with Christ College, Valparaiso University’s humanities-based honors college. He also serves as a senior fellow for the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities. Prior to coming to Valparaiso, he taught at Gordon College, where he founded and directed the Jerusalem and Athens Forum honors program and led the Center for Faith and Inquiry. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (Yale University Press, 2021), The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism(Oxford University Press, 2016), and (edited with Mark A. Noll) Protestantism after 500 Years (Oxford University Press, 2016). His writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and in more general venues such as Hedgehog Review, Wall Street Journal, Modern Age, Touchstone, Inside Higher Ed, National Interest, Christian Century, First Things, and Commonweal. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese. A new book, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History is recently out from Yale University Press. He is currently working on another entitled “Modern Christian Theology: An Intellectual History” (under contract with PrincetonUniversity Press) in addition to a collection of travel essays and an essay onthe Christian conception of wisdom.
Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History
A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century
A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century.
Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment—passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism—Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting different species of secularism, greater historical perspective, and case studies drawn from the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Mongolia, and China, among other countries, Howard calls into question the conventional tale of modernity as the pacifying triumph of secularism over a benighted religious past.
A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century.
Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment—passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism—Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting different species of secularism, greater historical perspective, and case studies drawn from the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Mongolia, and China, among other countries, Howard calls into question the conventional tale of modernity as the pacifying triumph of secularism over a benighted religious past.
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