Last week, David Garrow published his analysis of a cache of FBI notes about its surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s adultery. The piece has generated controversy among historians, but, I would argue, not nearly as much as it should. Many things are at stake. King’s reputation. FBI harassment of King and the Civil Rights Movement more generally. A serious crime. The ethical use of sources. Before I weigh in on this, I think it’s worth noting that white evangelicals... Read more
David Swartz interviews David King on his new book about World Vision Read more
Can evangelicalism be "kinder and gentler"? Chris profiles a prototypical figure of irenic evangelicalism: Carl H. Lundquist, former president of Bethel University and the National Association of Evangelicals. Read more
Almost exactly 30 years ago in June of 1989, I traveled to Europe for the first time—spending the summer in what was then routinely called “Eastern Europe,” those countries behind the “Iron Wall.” In particular, I traveled to Poland, Hungary, Romania, and what was then known as Czechoslovakia. I had gone with a Christian organization to deliver medical supplies and to meet up with several beleaguered Christian communities, all of which lived under governments officially committed to Marxist atheism. Anniversaries... Read more
Christians are required to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the third day. They are under no obligation to believe anything whatever about the actual chronology of the reported Resurrection appearances, which might have differed substantially from what we often hear in sermons around Eastertime. I have argued that the earliest stories of a Resurrection appearance happened much later than the third day of the Easter story, and they happened in Galilee, not Jerusalem. I stress appearance:... Read more
Yesterday, the trial began for Dr. Scott Warren, a geographer and volunteer with the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson. The Department of Justice alleges that Warren violated smuggling laws in his efforts to “conceal, harbor and shield from detection” undocumented immigrants from Mexico—a unique prosecution under human smuggling laws, which in Southern Arizona are typically used against those who smuggle for profit, rather than aid workers like Warren. Facing... Read more
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In fifteenth-century England, a (probably Franciscan) friar lived on the east coast near the cathedral city of Ely. Like many other medieval sermon authors, he included in his Lenten series a narrative from Matthew 15: the story of the Woman of Canaan. I am sure many of you are familiar with it. But, for those who are not, here it is: “Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came... Read more
Chris considers what fighting in NHL hockey has to do with the future of evangelicalism. Read more
I have been posting a lot in recent weeks on Christ’s Resurrection, a topic that Christians should really be considering and contemplating in the forty days or so following Easter Day. That was, the New Testament tells us, the time that the Risen Jesus remained with his disciples in order to teach them, prior to the Ascension. I am particularly interested in determining how far we can reconstruct the earliest claims and ideas concerning that event. Beyond debate, the Christian... Read more
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