When Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1822 that he anticipated the rapid decline of traditional Christian belief in the U.S., he was unaware that a young preacher named Charles Grandison Finney had already set in motion what would later be known as the Second Great Awakening. So observes Ross Douthat in commenting on a recent gathering that may turn out to be significant in the history of American religion:

[A] Christian college in rural Kentucky, Asbury University, has just experienced an old-school revival—a multiweek outpouring that has kept students praying and singing in the school chapel from morning to night, drawn tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the country, captured the imagination of the Internet, and even drawn the attention of the New York Times. . . . [W]hatever the Asbury Revival’s long-term impact, the history of Finney and Jefferson is a reminder that religious history is shaped as much by sudden irruptions as long trajectories, as much by the mystical and personal as by the institutional and sociological.

Secular experts writing about religion tend to emphasize the deep structural forces shaping practice and belief—the effects of industrialization or the scientific revolution, suburbanization or the birth-control pill. Religious intellectuals tend to emphasize theological debates and evangelization strategies. (Should Christians be winsome or combative? Should churches adapt to liberal modernity or resist its blandishments?)

These analytical tools are always important; the sociological doesn’t disappear just because the mystical has suddenly arrived. . . . But the experiences themselves remain irreducibly unpredictable. Why Asbury? Why Saul of Tarsus? Why Charles Grandison Finney?

When it comes to the religious future, you should follow the social trends, but also always expect the unexpected—recognizing that every organized faith could disappear tomorrow and some spiritual encounter would resurrect religion soon enough.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.