The Relevance of Religious History for Today
The Boston Marathon bombings and the faiths of the Tsarnaev brothers have renewed the debate about the nature of Islam, so this week I am reposting my review of Miroslav Volf’s Allah: A Christian Response, from the Patheos archives. – President George W. Bush created a boiling controversy amongst evangelicals in 2003 when he declared that [...]
Many people are not aware of the vital friendship between Benjamin Franklin and George Whitefield. Franklin became Whitefield’s key publicist and printer in the colonies in the early 1740s, and their relationship lasted until Whitefield’s death in 1770. They also exchanged friendly letters on many topics. One of the most fascinating exchanges between them came [...]
This coming week we are welcoming another new blogger to the Anxious Bench roster, David Swartz of Asbury University. From David’s website : David R. Swartz is an assistant professor of history at Asbury University. He earned his Ph.D. in American history at the University of Notre Dame under the direction of George Marsden and [...]
This week marks the 150th anniversary of the tragic death on May 10, 1863, of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson from wounds sustained at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Along with Robert E. Lee, Jackson occupies a special place of veneration in the memory of the Confederate cause. It is hard to say how many southern boys [...]
This coming week we are welcoming Miles Mullin of the J. Dalton Havard School for Theological Studies (Southwestern Baptist Seminary) as the latest addition to the Anxious Bench’s blogging roster! From Miles’s faculty profile at SWBTS: Miles S. Mullin, II is Assistant Professor of Church History at the J. Dalton Havard School for Theological Studies, Southwestern [...]
In the furor over the recent situations in Boston and West, Texas, we passed quietly over the 20th anniversary of the April 19, 1993 final assault on the Branch Davidian center in Elk, Texas (conventionally reported as “Waco,” which is nine miles away). I do not want to engage the technicalities or disputes surrounding the [...]
The scholarly study of the Puritans has been marked in recent years by attempts to understand them in a fully transatlantic context. This follows a broader trend in early American history to focus on “Atlantic world” perspectives, rather than proto-national American ones. While others could view this de-emphasizing of the future United States as ideologically [...]
North Carolina legislators recently made an ill-fated attempt to introduce Christianity as the state’s official religion. The move was precipitated by an ACLU lawsuit against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners, a board notorious for allowing people to utter Jesus’s name in prayers at their meetings. The establishment proposal generated a predictably breathless response from the left. [...]
In February I spoke at Regent University’s annual Reagan Symposium. This year’s theme was religion and presidential rhetoric, and C-SPAN has posted video of the event, with lectures by others including historians Daniel Dreisbach, Richard Gamble, Paul Kengor, and Gary Scott Smith. In my lecture, titled “Great Pillars of Human Happiness”: How Religion Has Framed [...]
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