Read a Nov. 8, 2012, review  from Time magazine of Stephen Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln. The review discusses the lessons to be learned from Lincoln’s legacy, and their relevance to modern-day issues.

Joe Wheeler is the author of 2008’s Abraham Lincoln: A Man of Faith and Courage and a general editor for Focus on the Family. He lives in Conifer, Colo.

Stewart Winger is an assistant professor of history at Illinois State University in Normal. His dissertation, written under Martin Marty at the University of Chicago, was titled Lincoln’s Religious Rhetoric: American Romanticism and the Antislavery Impulse. It was published as the 2003 book Lincoln, Religion and Romantic Cultural Politics.

Jennifer Weber is an assistant professor of history at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where she specializes in the Civil War. She was part of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s speakers bureau and offers a lecture titled “Lincoln and Religion.”

Robert Bray is a professor of English literature at Illinois Wesleyan University and the author of Peter Cartwright: Legendary Frontier Preacher. Cartwright was a contemporary of Lincoln’s and opposed him in the race for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1846, a race in which he used Lincoln’s supposed lack of religion against him.

John Turner teaches American history at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. He specializes in 19th-century American civil religion.

Richard Latner is a history professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. He specializes in the history of the Civil War.

Charles Hubbard is director of the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn.

James Byrd Jr. is an associate professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., where he has taught a class in religion and war in American history. He is also an expert on this story of Baptists and Methodists in the U.S. He has written two books about religion in early American […]