The Most Influential Book on Modern Culture

Bruce Gordon, Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Yale Divinity School

Dr. Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History Yale Divinity School with Secondary Appointment in the Department of History, and he is the author of the biographies Calvin and Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, and of a number of other books on the history of Christianity.

In Part One of their conversation, Marginalia's Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale University) talks with Professor Gordon about his new book, The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, 2024) and why it is essential to think about this text as a dynamic, global cultural force.

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A native of Canada, Bruce Gordon taught at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he was a professor of modern history and deputy director of the St. Andrews Reformation Studies Institute, before joining the Yale faculty in 2008. Gordon’s research and teaching focus on European religious cultures of the late-medieval and early modern periods, with a particular interest in the Reformation and its reception. He is the author of Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (Yale, 2021). His John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (Princeton 2016) looks at the reception from the sixteenth century to the age of YouTube of one of the defining works of the Reformation. He is the author of Calvin (Yale, 2009), a biography of the Genevan reformer, and the Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002), a Choice Magazine “Outstanding Publication” (2003). In 2021 he edited, with Carl Trueman, The Oxford Handbook to Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford). In addition, he has edited books and written widely on early modern history, biblical culture, Reformation devotion and spirituality, dissent and heresy, and the place of the dead in pre-modern culture. His most recent book is The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, 2024)

Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale University): Born in Athens, Greece, Samuel’s diverse origins give him global roots: in Okinawa, Japan, among the Chippewa (or Ojibwe) people, and in Eastern Europe (Poland and Croatia), and motivate his mission to unite the ancient and the modern. He practices an ancient art of philosophy, linked to the origins of science and Western spirituality, that promotes the perpetual evolution of human potential, and has applied his practice as a speaker and consultant for clients like the United Nations, Oliver Wyman, and Red Bull Arts. He is the Founder and CEO of Olurin Consulting and the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, where he directs the Meanings of Science Project and The New Biology Project. His first book, Philosophy as Religion and Science from Plato to Posthumanism is appearing with Columbia University Press.