R. Bryan Bademan

Bryan Bademan was raised in Minnesota and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1994 with a B.S. in Business Management. He continued his studies at Wheaton College (M.A., 1997) and the University of Notre Dame (Ph.D., 2003), where he wrote his dissertation on American Protestant critics of the Second Great Awakening. Before coming to the MacLaurin Institute, he held multiple positions including a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University and assistant professorships in history at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, and the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. His research interests lie at the intersection of Christian thought and practice (especially ecclesiology) and social identity, and he is working on a history of American religious nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Bryan writes and lectures widely on topics in American Christianity, church history, and the history of the Calvinist tradition. He is author, most recently, of “The Republican Reformer: John Calvin and the American Calvinists, 1830-1910” in Sober, Strict, and Scriptual: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800-2000; “The Edwards of History and the Edwards of Faith” in Reviews in American History; and “Monkeying with the Bible: Edgar J. Goodspeed’s American Translation” in Religion and American Culture. He lives in Saint Paul with his wife Tess and his two daughters, Elisabeth and Mary. Their family motto is “Always bring a book.”

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